' LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 



m*- H- 



Wlieii 



;.?35 



UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



THE SABBATH: 



SCIENTIFIC, 

REPUBLICAN, 

AND CHRISTIAN. 



Rev. ROBERT PATTERSON, D. D. 

Author of ** Fables of Infidelity," etc. 






WESTERN TRACT SOCIETY, 
Cincinnati, O. 






Entered according to Act of Congress, by 
WESTERN TRACT SOCIETY, 

Ift the office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington, D. C. 




*< Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy.gix days shalt thou 
labor, and do all thy work. But the seventh day is the sabbath of 
the Lord thy God : in it thou shalt not do any work, ihou, nor thy 
son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy 
cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates: for in six days the 
Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and 
rested the seventh day; wherefore the Lord blessed thf sabbath 
day, and hollowed it." 



CONTENTS. 



PAGB. 

CHAPTER I. 

The Scientific Basis of the Sabbath as one of the Laws of 

Nature, 5 

CHAPTER II. 
The Sabbath Weighed in Oxygen, . . . . . 14 

CHAPTER III. 
Will you Rest or Die ?...•.,. 23 

CHAPTER IV. 
The Working God's Sabbath and the Working Man's, . 30 

CHAPTER V. 
Rest or Riot? . , . . 40 

CHAPTER VI. 

Shall we Exchange our American Sabbath for a German 

Sunday? ...,..,,. 49 

CHAPTER VII. 
The Lord's Day, . 75 

CPIAPTER VIIL 
How to Enjoy Soul Rest, . . . • . , 90 



THE SABBATH: 

SCIENTIFIC, REPUBLICAN, AND CHRISTIAN, 



CHAPTER I. 

THE SCIENTIFIC BASIS OF THE SABBATH, AS ONE 
OF THE LAWS OF NATURE. 

The increase of Sabbath revelry and drudgery 
in our land is alarming. It is the theory of all 
Christians that workingmen have the right to rest 
one day in seven; but the practice by no means 
corresponds to the theory. The workingmen of 
Papal Europe enjoy no Sabbath; and the work- 
men of Protestant Geneva and Berlin are reduced 
to the seven-day drudgery of the Faubourgs of 
Paris. Presbyterian Scotland, groans under the 
rush of Sunday railroad trains and Sunday excur- 
sion steamers, compelling thousands of working- 
men to unresting drudgery seven days in the week. 
And in this, as in other fashions, the New World 
imitates the Old. Sunday newspapers usher in 
the day. Sunday picnics and excursions, Sunday 

(S) 



6 The Scientific Basis of the Sabbath, 

processions, Sunday funerals, Sunday trains and 
steamers, loading and discharging merchandise 
and passengers, saloons, tobacco-shops and fruit- 
stands in full business, in many places furnaces 
and factories in full blast, and, at night, the Sun- 
day theaters, with extraordinary attractions for 
the lewd and drunken, make havoc of the Sab- 
bath rest, and reduce hundreds of thousands of 
workingmen and women to seven-day drudgery. 

When the Church awakens to the discovery 
that she has lost her Sabbath, and tries to rally 
her forces for its recovery, she is chagrined to 
discover that her own sons are prominent patrons 
of Sabbath desecration. These young men and 
women, on the decks of the Sunday excursion 
steamers, have vacated their seats in the Sabbath- 
school, and many of them are the children of 
church members. Among the youths drinking 
beer, at the hill-top resorts, you may find sons 
of deacons, and elders, and judges, and ministers; 
and not a few of the Sunday excursionists on 
that train, bound for a distant city, are young 
gentlemen and ladies of Christian families, who, 
if you venture to express astonishment at seeing 
them so engaged, will tell you that their parents 
are church members, who ought to know what 
is right, and are stockholders, and some of them 
directors, of the railroad company affording these 
facilities for Sunday traveling. It can not be 
denied that members of evangelical churches, in 



As One of the Laws of Nature. 7 

good standing, countenance Sabbath desecration 
by buying and reading Sunday papers, traveling 
long journeys on Sunday trains, holding shares 
in, and sharing the profits of. Sabbath-breaking 
railroads, steamers and factories. These facts 
are open, notorious, repeated and continued for 
years ; and they are well known to the officers of 
the Church. It will not be denied by them, nor, 
indeed, by any serious Christian, that such con- 
duct is in violation of the Fourth Commandment. 

But it is remarkable that these public trans- 
gressions of the Fourth Commandment are not 
regarded, either by the offenders, or by the com- 
munity, as involving such condemnable immorality 
as the violation of any of the other command- 
ments of the moral lavv^. A Christian employer 
may rob his servant of his Sabbath rest fifty-two 
times a year without any reproach; but, if he rob- 
bed him only once of his Sabbath's wages, all the 
newspapers would pillory him as a scoundrel. An 
elder who should repeatedly profane God's name, 
would certainly be disciplined; but he may com- 
pel his servants to profane God's Sabbath habit- 
ually without any loss of church privileges, and 
almost without diminution of Christian character. 

These facts proclaim that, in the judgment of 
the majority of evangelical Christians, the Fourth 
Commandment does not stand on the same foun- 
dation of eternal righteousness as the other com- 
mandments, and, therefore, does not bind our 



8 TJte Scientific Basis of the Sahbathy 

consciences to yield obedience, as do the Fifth, 
or the Sixth, or the Seventh, or the Eighth. In- 
deed, some European theologians expressly assert 
this, and deny the divine authority of the Fourth 
Commandment over Christians. They treat it as 
a Jewish ordinance, of the same class as the ordi- 
nances of the unleavened bread, and the red heifer, 
and feast of tabernacles — fulfilled in Christ; and 
they place its observance solely upon the authority 
of the Church to appoint a common time for pub- 
lic worship, thus making the Sabbath merely a fes- 
tival, like Christmas or Thanksgiving. And some 
American writers accept this European view, and 
cease to contend for the right of the workingman 
to rest one day in seven, as a right with which he 
was endowed by his Creator, and so inalienable, 
like the right to life, to Hberty, and to the pursuit 
of happiness. 

I do not propose, in this paper, to discuss the 
scriptural or theological grounds upon which the 
moral authority of the Sabbath has been asserted, 
and, as I think, conclusively established. But it 
is evident that many educated Christians have not 
recognized these grounds as conclusive, and de- 
mand to know wJiy this ordinance of Sabbath rest 
should be considered of the same moral authority 
as the ether laws protecting life and property. To 
such I submit the answer: Because it is as neces- 
sary for the preservation of the worship of God, 
and of the welfare of man, as either of the other 



As One of the Laws of Nature, 



commandments of the Decalogue. And I propose 
to prove that, as one of the applications of the 
great law of periodicity (a law now recognized, by 
all scientists, as world-wide and eternal), the Sab- 
bath rests on the same scientific basis as the con- 
stitution of the atmosphere, or the law of gravi- 
tation, or the succession of day and night, and the 
duties thence arising. 

Such a discussion may also have its effects upon 
persons who do not profess religion, but who own 
their obligation to practice humanity. If it can 
be demonstrated that Sabbath rest is as necessary 
for the preservation of human life as ventilation, 
and that it is, in fact, indispensable to the proper 
vitalization of the blood, humanitarians may be 
willing to unite with theologians for its preserva- 
tion. If men of science can satisfy themselves, 
by experiment and demonstration, that the great 
law of periodicity regulates human life, no less 
than the life of crystals, or the life of plants, and 
that the formula for man, of Motion 6 plus Rest i, 
is of the same validity as the law of respiration, 
requiring Nitrogen "jj plus Oxygen 21, for the 
breath of life, they may be led to accept that fact 
of science as an expression of God's will, in na- 
ture, that all men should enjoy the Sabbath rest. 

This proof will appear upon an investigation of 
the law of periodicity. Such an investigation will 
demonstrate the perpetual dependence of our earth 
upon the revolutions of the heavens, of which it 



10 The Scientific Basis of the Sabbath^ 

forms a part, and which have held it, and all its 
tenants, in unswerving allegiance to the law of 
periodicity, from the remotest ages known to man. 
This law of periodicity Hes at the very foundations 
of the earth, which v/ere not laid by slow and 
uninterrupted, gradual deposits alone, but were 
frequently upheaved and tilted and contorted, and 
again deposited, by geological revolutions and con- 
vulsions, in all manner of dips, inclinations, cleav- 
ages, and upheavals. After these rocks were de- 
posited, they were not compelled to a monotonous, 
leisurely drudgery of their life-work, but led a life 
varied by the periods of work and rest prescribed 
by the law of periodicity. As the geologist, stand- 
ing amidst the palms of India, or on the fertile 
prairies of Illinois, marks the scratchings and fur- 
rows which the glacier ice-plow once ground on 
the rocks, or the cargo of boulders deposited by 
an iceberg, which once floated fathoms overhead, 
in an arctic sea, he becomes convinced that the 
existing day of light and Hfe here must have been 
preceded by a night of freezing death. He learns, 
also, that the access of heat, which melted out the 
glaciers of the great ice-age, could not have been 
generated by any supposed cooling of the globe 
(which must have exerted an influence precisely 
opposite), but must have arisen from some change 
in the relations of our cold, insensate earth, to 
the great celestial source of heat and joy. Earth's 
great periods, then, depend upon the heavens. 



As One of the Laws of Nature, 1 1 

Sufficient attention has not yet been bestowed 
upon the great fact, attested by science, that the 
history of our world is not at all a history of slow, 
gradual, monotonous progress, in" one unvarying 
course; but is, on the contrary, the history of a 
succession of revolutions — a history of seasons of 
work succeeded by seasons of repose; of days of 
light and life followed by evenings darkening into 
nights of silence and rest ; of continents upheaved 
from the depths of the ocean, to enjoy millen- 
niums of sunlight, and to be clothed with verdant 
grasses, and adorned with mighty forests, and 
again to sink beneath the waves, and enjoy repose, 
while old ocean covered them with fresh strata. 
Geology is the science of the periodicity of our 
globe. 

The law of periodicity is the law of the life oi 
the world. This law of revolutions and altern- 
ations is universal and perpetual. Everything 
known to man is subject to the law of periodic- 
ity. The light of the stars, in the remotest 
heavens, pulsates in undulations as regular as those 
which impel the life-blood of the m.ortals who be- 
hold it. The moon makes her monthly voyage 
with more regularity than the merchant ships, 
which avail themselves of the spring tides which 
she produces, to sail up our bays, and, after the 
tossings of the ocean storms, enter the longed-for 
haven of rest. The spots on the surface of the 
sun revolve in their mysterious cycle, affecting the 



1 2 As One of the Laws of Nature. 

vast plains of Australia, and the mountains and 
plains of California, now with arid drought, and 
again blessing them with the rain of plenty. The 
smaller cycles of periodicity in the heavens, are 
equally identified with those of every substance 
upon earth. Not only is the cycle of sun-spots 
reflected in the great magnetic earth-storm ; the 
daily current of earthly magnetism, influenced by 
the daily rotation of the earth, is measurably af- 
fected by the darkness of night; and all the min- 
erals and crystals are formed by it, subject to the 
law of periodicity. It has been long known that 
all crystals are formed subject to fixed laws, which 
prescribe their respective forms, of cube, or pyra- 
mid, or prism ; but only recently have experiments 
demonstrated that the crystals of iron, and, infer- 
entially, all other crystals, are as dependent upon 
the law of periodicity for their Hfe, as upon laws 
of chemistry for their form. 

As this discovery of the periodicity of crystals 
of iron has an immediate bearing upon the Sab- 
bath rest, it is worth while to narrate it. The 
Northwestern Railway Company, of England, em- 
ploys several thousand cars. Fifteen years ago the 
company suffered continual losses from the breaking 
of railway axles, and directed their chief engineer 
to make a thorough investigation of the cause. 
He found, upon careful examination, that the 
crystals of the iron, in the broken axles, had 
changed their form. When a bar of wrought- 



The Scientific Basis of the Sahhath, 13 

iron is nicked around with a chisel, and broken 
with a blow of a sledge-hammer, you can see the 
crystals quite distinctly, large and regular; and, 
when beaten and bent, they draw out into tough 
fibers. But, in the broken axles no fibrous ap- 
pearance was visible; and the crystals had changed 
their size and color, so that they were now small 
and brittle, and broke off short, like glass. The 
cause of this change of structure the engineer de- 
monstrated to be the incessant activity of the axle, 
and the consequent continual concussion against 
the box, caused by the wheels striking the points 
of the rails. He subjected a bar of iron to the 
incessant hammering of a light hammer, suspended 
from the working-beam of an engine, and pro- 
duced a similar destruction of the life of the iron 
by a change of its crystaUization. He showed that 
the only method of preventing the destruction of 
the iron was, to allow it to cool off thoroughly 
every eight days; in short, to allow the railway 
axle a Sabbath rest. The law of periodicity, then, 
governs bars of iron. 



14 Tlie Sabbath Weighed in Oxygen, 



CHAPTER II. 

THE SABBATH WEIGHED IN OXYGEN. 

As we advance to higher organizations, the law 
of periodicity asserts its authority still more em- 
phatically and visibly. In the vegetable world we 
observe the law presenting itself with greater prom- 
inence than amon:^ the minerals. The trees bud 
and blossom, and ripen their fruit, and cast their 
fruit and their leaves, and retire within themselves 
for the rest of the winter. They do this even in 
San Francisco, where no necessity of climate 
withers their leaves; they drop them and rest 
from a necessity of nature. The nurseryman will 
tell you, that even those roses called ''perpetual" 
must be allowed two months of rest from bloom- 
ing, if you would enjoy the full beauty and fra- 
grance of their flowers for any length of time; 
otherwise they will soon flower themselves to 
death. And as with the roses, so with every kind 
of vegetable life; alternate seasons of work and 
rest are the conditions of their Hves. 

The animal world is no less subject to the law of 
periodicity, but demands more frequent periods of 
repose. The ox dragging the plow, and the horse 
careering the plain, can not, by any appliances of 



The Sabbath- Weighed z?z Oxyge^u 15 

nourishment or stimulus, be kept continuously at 
work. Tiiey must be allowed to rest at intervals, 
or die. Man, the head workman in God's world, 
is also placed under the operation of the universal 
law of periodicity; when his strength is exhausted 
by toil he must rest his wearied limbs, and gladly 
lies down to repose. Not the limbs only; his mind 
also, dependent upon the body, must periodically 
relax its tension, and change its course of thought; 
else monomania and insanity will wreck its life. 

The law of periodicity being thus observed to 
govern the nature of minerals and plants, of ani- 
mals and men, requiring alternate seasons of mo- 
tion and repose, it becomes imiportant to ascertain 
the precise measures of these seasons, and the 
proper proportions of motion and rest to each 
other. For there is nothing of which science is 
more firmly persuaded than that all things are 
made by measure, and weight, and number; even 
the so-called imponderable forces of light, heat and 
electricity it endeavors to translate into foot-pounds. 
The motions made by man, whether of his lungs, 
or of his brain, or of his hands, are as proper, and 
far more interesting, subjects of scientific study 
than the motions of the stars. 

We may endeavor to discover the proper pro- 
portions of labor and rest for animals and men, 
either experimentally, by our own observations, or 
scripturally, by reading the record of God. The 
records of scientific observations are valued accord- 



1 6 The Sabbath Weighed in Oxygen. 

ing to the character of the observer for accuracy 
and intelligence; those made by Kepler, or New- 
ton, or Herschel, being universally accepted on the 
strength of the character of the observers. The 
character of God, as a scientific observer, stands 
confessedly high. All his works in heaven and 
earth are made by numbers, and weights, and meas- 
ures of the most accurate scales. Especially are 
God's measures of time standard measures. Ships' 
chronometers are regulated by God's clock, which, 
during the seventy generations we have watched 
it, has never been known to gain or lose a second. 
These measures are not only accurate, but use- 
ful; and they apply to our earth, as well as to the 
heavens. Our globe, for instance, revolves upon 
its axis every twenty-four hours, miaking a regular 
succession of day and night. This measure of 
time is not taken at haphazard, but is selected in 
infinite wisdom, as that best suited to the welfare 
of man and beast. Had some other period been 
selected for the length of the day, many inconven- 
iences would have been incurred. For instance, 
had the length of the day been doubled, so that we 
should have had an average of twenty-four hours of 
sunshine, and twenty-four hours night, the greater 
part of the world would have been sun-burnt into 
a Sahara by day, and scorched v/ith frost by night. 
Or had the day been only twelve hours, the earth 
must have revolved so rapidly as to sweep the now 
habitable parts with a perpetual tempest. 



The Sabbath Weighed in Oxygen. 17 

When, therefore, we hear God uttering the appli- 
cation of the law of periodicity to man's working 
and resting time during the week, we, have every 
reason to presume that God's weekly period would 
be found to be as benevolent, and as scientifically 
accurate, as the yearly period, or as the daily 
period. Would God, who has made so many 
thousands of accurate adjustments of time in the 
machinery of the stars, blunder when He came 
to the most important of all time measures — the 
weekly Sabbath, on the righteousness of which de- 
pends the life of the bodies, and the salvation of 
the souls, of unnumbered millions of his dear chil- 
dren? Is it Hkely that He who has so accurately 
measured out the twenty-one parts of oxygen, and 
the seventy-seven parts of nitrogen, which make 
the breath of life, would fail of accuracy in the 
proportions of labor and rest of which that life 
consists? 

The attention of men of science was first directed 
to this subject by the statistics published by Mr. 
Bianconi, the owner of a number of stage lines in 
the south of Ireland, employing some thousands of 
horses, to whom it was an object to reduce the 
wear and tear of his horses as much as possible. 
He made experiments, and discovered that he 
could not keep his horses in good condition while 
working them seven days in the week, and that 
they wore out much sooner than when allowed 
their Sabbath rest. He states that his horses will 



1 8 The Sabbath Weighed in Oxygen, 

run eight miles an hour for six days in the week, 
better than six miles an hour for seven days in the 
week, and that he thus makes a saving of thirteen 
per cent, by obeying the commandment which 
secures rest on the Sabbath even for the ox and 
the ass. He adds: ''I am persuaded man can not 
be v/iser than his Maker.'* 

The scientific application to men of the result of 
Mr. Pianconi's experiments upon Sabbath-keeping 
stage horses was quite easy. ' If, in the Fourth 
Commandment, God commanded that working 
cattle, and working men, should rest on the Sab- 
bath, and if experiments on the working horses 
demonstrated that not only were their hves pro- 
longed by Sabbath rest more than one-seventh, 
but that their vigor was also increased thirteen per 
cent, by resting on the Sabbath, it was most Hkely 
that working men would be equally invigorated by 
Sabbath rest, and that it would prolong the du- 
ration of their lives; for every one knows that 
constant toil exhausts the life of the drudge. It 
only remained to ascertain by experiment how 
much of a man's life is used up by a day's labor. 

Human Hfe is sustained by breathing air, the 
breath of life ; and is speedily exhausted if the air 
is shut off, or poisoned by impure gases. The 
breath of life is composed of twenty-one parts of 
oxygen, seventy-seven of nitrogen, and two per 
cent, of vapor. It is the oxygen which unites with 
our blood to redden it, and give it life. God made 



The Sabbath Weighed in Oxygen. 19 

these proportions with perfect accuracy when he 
formed our atmosphere. No other proportions 
would preserve human Hfe. In breathing, we con- 
sume the oxygen of the air, and convert it into 
carbonic acid, a poisonous gas, which we breathe 
out from our lungs. When working we breathe 
deeper and faster, and consume more oxygen than 
when at rest; and, in fact, consume more oxygen 
than we take in. The surplus is taken from our blood 
and muscles: we are then using up our lives. How 
much of a man's hfe is thus used in a day's work? 
It is well known that the w^aste of the human 
frame is accompanied by the excretion of carbonic 
acid in direct proportion to the waste of life. Two 
of the savans of the Academy of Munich, Petten- 
kofer and Voit, having constructed a respirator en- 
abling them to weigh and measure the breath and 
vapors expired from the human frame, experi- 
mented on a man at rest and a man at work. They 
presented a paper to the Academy in which they 
state that, ' * in comparing the total of the two days 
of the experiment, it appears that, on the day of 
labor, there Avere 373 grammes of carbonic acid 
excreted more than on the day of rest, and 246 
grammes of oxygen more absorbed. But in 373 
grammes of carbonic acid, containing 271 grammes 
of oxygen, there is a difference of 25 grammes of 
oxygen used in excess of that taken from the air." 
(''The Annual Scientific Discovery," 1869. Page 
298.) 



20 The Sabbath Weighed in Oxygen, 

That means that the workingman used up 25 
grammes of his life in that day's work. In six 
days he used up 150 grammes of his Hfe; in seven 
days 175 grammes. In one year of continuous 
labor he expended 9, lOO grammes of oxygen more 
than he inspired. It needs no very profound sci- 
ence to calculate that at that rate his original stock 
of vigor would eventually exhaust itself, no matter 
how large it v/as at first ; and that the man's life 
would be spent much faster than that of the man 
who, by resting on the Sabbath, restored to his 
frame the amount of oxygen which he had over- 
drawn during the week. And the facts of the case 
fully confirm the conclusion. Horace Greeley tells 
us that he found no old men in the workshops 
of Paris, where the workmen enjoy no Sabbath. 

The repose of the night is not sufficient to re- 
store this waste; nor does the breathing machinery 
let down its fever heat and speed enough during 
the night. Dr. Stratton, in the Ediiibtagh Medical 
and Surgical Journal, January, 1843, states as the 
result of several series of observations, '^that in 
health the human pulse is more frequent in the 
morning than in the evening, for six days out of 
seven, and that on the seventh day it is slower." 

I am anxious that this vital fact should be clearly 
understood by every workingman, for every work- 
ingman experiences it. Let us, for the sake of 
illustration, put a money value upon the breath 
of life, though no sane man would sell it for any 



The Sabbath Weighed in Oxygen, 2t 

price if he knew what he was selling. But let us 
value the oxygen at only a cent a gramme. Then 
the laborer only receives two dollars and forty-six 
cents a day for his work, and it costs him to live 
two dollars and seventy-one cents. He is plainly 
losing twenty-five cents a day, or one dollar and 
seventy-five cents in his seven days' drudgery, and 
that makes ninety-one dollars a year. Suppose the 
man to have been a modern Samson, to have had 
a thousand dollars' worth of life to begin with, in 
eleven years of seven-day drudgery he would ex- 
haust it all. 

But if he rests every Sabbath day, he not only 
does not overdraw his oxygen on that day, but he 
makes a saving. For, though he does not breathe 
in as much oxygen as when he is working, he does 
not consume so much, so that on Sabbath night he 
has a great deal more oxygen in him than he had 
on Saturday night. To return to our dollars and 
cents : he gets half a day's wages and his board on 
Sabbath, to meet the loss of twenty-five cents a day 
for the six working days of the week, so that he 
can not merely pay his way, but have a few cents 
over on Monday morning. He has got a new 
start — a fresh lease of life. He has more oxygen 
in his blood, and that means more Hfe. The poor 
fellow has actually got a few grammes of life ahead. 
So, on Monday morning, his head is clear, his eye 
is bright, the stiffness is gone from his back, his 
knees are supple again. He feels in every bone of 



22 The Sabbat J I Weighed in Oxygen, 

his body the blessing of God's blessed day of rest. 
As he kisses his wife, and gives his little boy three 
tosses and a shake, and steps out cheerily to his 
work, he feels himself a new man; though, per- 
haps, he does not know why, nor even thank God, 
who has blessed him with a fresh supply of life in 
his blood by the rest of the blessed Sabbath. The 
Sabbath rest, then, of one day in seven, is the ex- 
act proportion of rest necessary to repair the waste 
of life, caused by the labor of the week, and leave 
a Httle over for the enjoyment of life and vigor. 

It is upon this ground, of the vital necessity of 
the Sabbath for the supply of the deficiency of 
oxygen, caused by work in men and beasts, that 
the Lord insists upon the Sabbath rest, in his third 
reiteration of the Sabbath law, in Exodus xxiii. 12: 
**Six days shalt thou do thy work, and on the 
seventh day thou shalt rest: that thine ox and 
thine ass may rest, and the son of thine handmaid, 
and the stranger, may take breath.'' t^D^l our 
translation renders ''may be refreshed;" but God 
gives more accurately the precise mode by which 
the workingman is refreshed, by his Sabbath rest, 
**by taking breath," by supplying the deficient 
breath of life. 



Will You Rest or Die? ^^ 



CHAPTER IIL 

WILL YOU REST OR DIE? 

The weary workers of the world sorely need, 
above all things, rest — to rest their limbs, to rest 
their souls. Galton says, that men nowadays are 
in danger of sinking into imbecility. We see it 
ourselves in the pale faces, and bent forms, of the 
mechanics and factory laborers, and in their rush 
to the taverns, for intoxicating liquors, to rouse 
up their exhausted energies. The brain-workers 
of the world are sinking under their labors, into 
paralysis, insomnia, brain softening and insanity, 
at a rate never known in the world before. And 
women are becoming utterly unequal to the life- 
work performed by their grandmothers for four- 
score years and ten, and dying in the middle of 
their days, under the burden of family cares. In 
short, the humaii race is working itself to death, 
and needs, above all things, God's blessed Sab- 
bath rest. 

The Sabbath weighed in oxygen is life to the 
weary worker. Medical men had long ago ob- 
served, that the duration of human life was 
greatly abridged by constant work, either with 
the hands or with the head ; and all the eminent 



^4 Will You Rest or Die? 

physiologists, without any exception, assert that 
the nightly repose is not sufficient to restore the 
vigor of the workingman, but that the weekly 
day of rest is indispensable to prevent premature 
death, from toil. In England, the average town- 
life of gentlemen is forty- two years, but the life 
of the laborer is reduced, by the wear and tear 
of toil and poverty,- to one-half of this period — 

to twenty-one years. Six hundred and forty-one 
of the most eminent London physicians, in a 
memorial to Parliament, against a proposal to 
legalize Sabbath desecration, say: ''Your peti- 
tioners, from their acquaintance with the labor- 
ing classes, and with the laws which regulate the 
human economy, are convinced that a seventh 
day of rest, instituted by God, and coeval with 
the existence of man, is essential to the bodily 
health and mental vigor of men in every station 
of hfe." 

Especially indispensable is the rest of the Sab- 
bath to professional men, to merchants, and to 
politicians, and to all brain-workers. From the 
multitude of testimonies of the most eminent 
physicians of Europe and America, without one 
dissenting voice, I shall cite only one, that of 
the learned rationalistic physiologist, Dr. Draper, 
who thus asserts the physiological influence oi 
the Sabbath rest: '*In whatever position of life 
we may be placed, it is needful for us to have 
an opportunity of rest. No man can, for any 



Will You Rest or Die? 25 

length of time, pursue one avocation, or one 
train of thought, without mental, and, therefore, 
bodily injury; nay, without insanity. The con- 
stitution of the brain is such that it must have 
its time of repose. Periodicity is stamped upon 
it. Nor is it enough that it is awake and in 
action bj^ day, and in the silence of night ob- 
tains rest and repose; that same periodicity which 
belongs to it, as a whole, belongs to all its con- 
stituent parts. One portion of it can not be 
called into incessant action without the risk of 
injury. Its different regions, devoted to different 
functions, must have their separate times of rest. 
The excitement of one part must be coincident 
with a pause in the action of another. It is not 
possible for mental equilibrium to be maintained 
with one idea, or one monotonous mode, of life. 
There is a necessity even for men of great in- 
tellectual endowments, whose minds are often 
strained to the utmost, to fall back on other pur- 
suits; and thus it will always be that one seeks 
refuge in the pleasures of quiet country life, an- 
other in foreign travel, another in social amuse- 
ments. Pitt sought a relaxation from the cares 
of politics in the excitement of the chase. Davy 
found a relief and a consolation in the rod and 
line. And among men whose lot is cast in the 
lowest condition, whose hard destiny it is to 
spend their whole lives in the pursuit of their 
daily bread, with one train of thought, and one 



26 Will You Rest or Die? 

unvarying course of events, the same principle 
imperiously applies. It is often said, that the 
pleasures of religion are wholly prospective, and 
to be realized only in another world; but in this 
there is a mistake, for those consolations com- 
mence even here, and temper the bitterness of 
fate. The virtuous laborer, though he may be 
ground down with the oppression of his social 
condition, is not without his relief; at the anvil, 
the loom, or even at the bottom of the mine, he 
is leading a double existence; the miseries of the 
body find a contrast in the calm of the soul; 
the warfare without is compensated by the peace 
within; the dark night of life here serves only 
to brighten the glories of the prospect beyond; 
hope is the daughter of despair. And thus a 
kind Providence so overrules events that it mat- 
ters not in vv^hat station we may be — wealthy or 
poor, intellectual or lowly — a refuge is always at 
hand, and the mind, worn out with one thing, 
turns to another, and its physical excitement is 
followed by physical repose. By the enforcement 
of the Sabbath, the Church gave effect to this 
providential system of physical and mental relief. 
Her chief strength lay in this, that she concerned 
herself with the common man, who never in the 
world^s history before had any to watch over or 
care for him. She humanized him by the devo- 
tional solemnities of a sacred day — a day of entire 
relief from toil Ignorant and rude though he 



Will Ycu Rest or Diet tf 



might be, it was not possible for him to enter 
her hoary temples without being made a better 
man. The atmosphere of rest, the twilight stream- 
ing through the painted windows, the prayer in 
an unknown tongue, the slow chanting of the old 
hymns, or the swelling forth of those noble strains 
of music which once heard are graven in remem- 
brance forever; these she had m.ade, with more 
than worldly wisdom, the elements or the inci- 
dents of her public worship. She gratified the 
manly sense by asserting before her altars the 
equality of all men, by making the vain and tran- 
sitory gradations of Hfe disappear, and by teach- 
ing the rich and the poor, the great and the hum- 
ble, their common dependence upon the mercy of 
God.^' 

Testimonies to the sanitary necessity of the 
Sabbath for the world's workers as emphatic, 
though not so eloquent, as the above, from dis- 
tinguished scientists, might be multipHed; but it 
is needless to do so, since there is no conflicting 
testimony. 

The Sabbath, then, has a scientific standing, as 
one of the great laws of nature. It stands on 
the same immovable basis as the law of gravita- 
tion, or as the law of the composition of the air 
we breathe. The man who neglects, or refuses, 
the rest of the Sabbath, fights against his own 
life. His being an unbeliever in the Bible will 
not save him from early death, or insanity, as 



28 JVi/I You Rest or Diet 

the result of his Sabbath breaking, any more 
than his not beheving in chemistry will save him 
from poisoning by breathing carbonic acid. The 
Bible simply reveals, what men have since found 
true by experiment, that man, like all other be- 
ings, is subject to the law of periodicity, and, 
after six days' work, must rest the seventh, if he 
would enjoy a blessed life. 

The time has passed for sneering at the Puri- 
tanic Sabbath; it is no longer a mere superstition 
of Calvinism; the Sabbath is a fact of chemistry; 
it stands among the solidities of science. The 
Sabbath must henceforth be recognized as a mat- 
ter of oxygen ; as an affair of life and death. 
Sabbath breaking, and sewer gas, and unventil- 
ated rooms, must ever be associated in our con- 
ceptions of the murderers of mankind. The di- 
vine who now abandons the divine authority of 
the Sabbath may as well deny the moral basis 
of the Sixth Commandment. Discussions about 
prolepsis, anthropomorphism, and gospel liberty 
are obsolete, since the Sabbath has been weighed 
in oxj'gen, and demonstrated to be necessary to 
allow workingmen to inspire enough of the breath 
of life to keep them alive. 

Employers who induce or compel their servants 
to drudge seven days in the week must reckon 
with God, who is no respecter of persons, for the 
slow but sure destruction of human life which they 
inflict ; to use a plain word, for killing the children 



Will You Rest or Die? 29 



of God for the sake of the money they hope to 
make by their Sabbath labor. For, if no money 
could be made by it Sabbath labor would cease. 
Does any capitalist imagine that he leaves a bless- 
ing to his children when he leaves money made 
out of the lives of his laborers? or that they 
will enjoy lives of happiness in spending the price 
of blood? 

The Christian Church also should recognize the 
Sabbath as standing on the same basis of eternal 
rip"hteousness as the other duties of the moral law. 
The standards of all Christian Churches acknowl- 
edge the Fourth Com.mandment as of equal divine 
authority, and universal obligation, with the Fifth 
or Sixth, and the other precepts of the Decalogue. 
Why, then, do the most of them grant absolution 
to its transgressors? The Popish priest does not 
grant indulgence or absolution for this, or for any 
other transgression, without a price paid, or a 
penance performed. But the evangelical churches 
grant unlimited absolution to their members for 
public and repeated transgressions of the Fourth 
Commandment. My brethren, these things ought 
not so to be. 



30 The Working Gods Sabbath 



CHAPTER IV. 

THE WORKING GOD's SABBATH AND THE WORKING- 

man's. 

In former chapters we examined the place of the 
Sabbath among the certainties of science, and dis- 
covered that it is one of the laws of nature; one 
of the great applications of the law of periodicity, 
which controls all the motions, and which regu- 
lates all the work, of the heavens and the earth. 
Railroad axles, and stage-horses, and laboring men, 
and brain-workers must rest from their common 
labor one day in seven, or die of drudgery. This 
is not the assertion of the Westminster divines, 
but of German physiologists, demonstrating that 
the workingman breathes out an ounce of oxygen, 
in a day's work, more than he breathes in, and 
must rest, and breathe in oxygen, on the Sabbath, 
or exhaust his hfe in a few years. 

Thus far science can guide our investigations 
of one of the great laws of nature. The man ac- 
customed to trace law to the Lawgiver, and to 
behold in his laws the features of his character — 
the rightness, and wisdom, and goodness of God — 
will desire to trace this law of periodicity to that 
fountain. As the law of gravitation, or the laws 
of light, heat, and electricity are adapted by the 



Aud the WorkingmaJi's, 31 

Creator to the constitution of nature, so, he infers, 
must this law of periodicity be grounded in the 
very foundation of things. The physiological must 
be founded in the theological, since it is mind thr.t 
organizes matter. And so the bodily rest, to be 
salutarj^ to the health, must be preceded by a 
Sabbath of the soul. Science declares the law of 
rest, after labor, to be invariable and everlasting 
throughout all her domain; and infers, accord- 
ingly, that it is a revelation of the divine nature. 

The Bible opens up to us a volume not found 
in the library of science, yet corresponding ex- 
actly with those teachings of science to which 
we have just listened. Its opening chapters in- 
form us, that God created man in his own like- 
ness, and employed him to imitate, according to 
his limited ability, the works of his Father in 
heaven. The design of man's life-work was the 
same as that of God's — the display of God's 
glory to all his intelligent family; to angels and 
men. To accompHsh this end, it is necessary 
that man's work should be regulated by the same 
principles as those regulating the work of the 
Great Worker, otherwise conflicting plans must 
issue in misunderstanding, discord and misery. 

Man learns to work by imitating the methods of 
more skilled workmen. The little girl, with her 
toy broom, imitates the motions of her mother 
in sweeping the floor; and the artist travels to 
distant cities that he may obtain admittance to 



32 The Working God's Sabbath 

the studio of some superior artist, and become 
inspired with his ideas, and imitate his painting. 
But, for success in the great work of human hfe, it 
is infinitely more necessary for every human worker 
to study the principles and imitate the methods of 
the great Master Worker of the world, whose pro- 
ductions have never been equaled in the beauty of 
his designs, nor in the perfection of his workman- 
ship; and who, with a noble generosity, throws 
open his methods, and invites us not only to ad- 
mire, but to imitate him in his excellent working, 
and in his beneficent resting from his work. We 
may study God's methods of working by observ- 
ing nature, and by reading the Bible. 

The Bible opens with a revelation of God's 
method of working. And the most prominent 
and universal law, or method of God's working, 
is the law of periodicity. He works for a cer- 
tain period ; then ceases. After six days of act- 
ive creation of the world and its tenants, he rests 
on the seventh day. He emphasizes the fact lest 
man should overlook it. He declares, in Genesis, 
that ''God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified 
it, because that in it he rested from all his w^ork, 
vv^hich God created and made." Again, in the 
Decalogue, he repeats this proclamation of the 
divine original of the law of periodicity. And 
ten times throughout the law does he reiterate 
the assertion that man's Sabbath rest is a sign 



And the Workiugman' s, 33 

between God and us, of the child's likeness to 
the Father. 

The assertion that ''God rested from his works 
on the seventh day'' has been dismissed by some 
interpreters as a mere anthropomorphism, a figure 
of speech; as if God accommodated himself to our 
weakness. In support of this exegesis, such are 
wont to refer to Exodus xxxi. 17, where the same 
writer states that, on the seventh day, ''God 
rested, and was refreshed." This, they allege, is 
evidently inappHcable to the Infinite Spirit, who 
can not be fatigued with his efforts ; nor needs, 
like man, to refresh his wearied Hmbs by repose. 
They accordingly dismiss this profound oracle as 
a mere figure of speech; and as a figure desti- 
tute of any corresponding reahty — a fiction. 

But the discoveries of science, to which w^e have 
alluded, will not permit any such slovenly exe- 
gesis. The great lav/ of periodicity is no mere 
figure of speech, but one of the fundamental laws 
of nature, reaching out to the farthest star, whose 
undulating light twinkles in our eyes, and ope- 
rating away far back in the geological eterni- 
ties of the foundations of the earth. It is be- 
yond contradiction, that in the geological ages 
God wrought as Creator, producing numberless 
new species of fish and reptiles, of plants and 
animals, previously unknown ; but that, since the 
dawn of human history, there is no record of 
any such new creation. Moses' assertion is no 



34 The Working GoSs Sabbath 

mere figure of speech, but the statement of a 
great fact, that since the creation of man God has 
rested from the work of creation. 

This indisputable fact, that God's rest-day has 
lasted some six thousand years, enables us to 
form a better idea of the six working days which 
it concludes. For the days of the Mosaic account 
of the creation-week must bear some proportion 
to each other. If God's Sabbath day extends 
over thousands of years, his working days ought 
not to be confined, in our idea, to twenty-four 
hours each; but should, like his Sabbath, include 
vast periods. Indeed, the Book opens with a 
definition of the word *'day," which has no chro- 
nological reference, except by implication. After 
describing the primeval darkness, and the com- 
mand, ''Let there be light," it is said, ''And 
God called the light Day, and the darkness called 
he Night. And there was evening, and there was 
morning, day one.'* But who shall calculate the 
length of that primeval darkness which constituted 
the evening of the first unmeasured and unmeasur- 
able day? Peter asserts that the Day of Judgment 
extends over a thousand years. Man's little, short- 
lived works are fitly enough measured by the revo- 
lutions of our little earth; but the days of the years 
of the Eternal are marked by the revolutions of 
ages, and his weekly Sabbath of rest follows upon 
the completion of the creations of worlds. The 
fact that God has rested since man's creation is 



A7id the Working7naiis. 35 

indisputable, and demonstrates that the law of 
periodicity is as truly a law of God, to which he 
conforms his actions, as the law of gravitation. 

But a question will arise in the mind of the 
serious inquirer as to the motive inspiring God 
to institute this law of periodicity. Was it for 
his own benefit, or for ours? Did God's nature 
need repose from labor? Or did he repose merely 
to set us an example of Sabbath-keeping? Some 
theologians have summarily decided this great and 
mysterious question, and answered, **That God 
fainteth not, neither is weary, and therefore ceased 
from his work on the seventh day merely to set us 
an example of Sabbath-rest.*' 

But every serious soul feels that this is not a 
complete account of the matter. Our minds are 
not satisfied v/ith the idea that God acts a theatrical 
part, and assumes a feigned rest, and a satisfaction 
in a repose he does not feel. We must reverently 
prosecute our inquiries further into God's rest. 

Any correct understanding of the design of God's 
rest depends upon our previous understanding of 
the design of God's work. The question has been 
put, accordingly, in this manner: Was it for his 
own gratification, or for the happiness of his creat- 
ures, that God created the worlds and their in- 
habitants? The Bible never gives any warrant for 
such an antithesis; but represents God's glory, and 
his creatures' welfare, as ever inseparably united. 

Let it, then, be granted that the welfare of his 



36 The Working God's Sabbath 

creatures was one great end of God's work of cre- 
ation, and that the knowledge of God is the high- 
est form of life, it follows that God designed to 
reveal himself in creation to his intelligent creat- 
ures. But the revelation of God in creation de- 
mands time — slow and gradual progress ; for, had 
creation been as instantaneous as a flash of light- 
ning, neither angels nor men could have learned 
the lesson of God's wisdom and goodness, which 
the study of nature imparts, When God had 
completed our world, and stocked it with plants, 
and tishes, and animals, and men, it became a great 
object-lesson in natural theology, and in moral 
science, not only to men, but to the people of 
other worlds. So the Holy Ghost assures us, 
that **Unto the princes and powers of heaven is 
made known by the Church the manifold wisdom 
of God.'* All which requires time — time to de- 
velop history, and time to study history, and see 
God's wisdom and goodness therein, that angels 
and men might learn the knowledge of God. 

Observation of the works of God demands not 
only time, but periodicity. Had the atmosphere 
remained at rest, no sounds would have been 
audible to human ears ; and, had the rush of the 
motion of the atmosphere been invariable, we 
had been equally deaf to it: it is only the waves 
of sound that break audibly on our ears. The 
same law of periodicity — that is, of alternations 
of motion and rest— conditions our vision of ligh^ 



A7td the WorkingrnaTis, 37 

and colors; it is not the flow of light, but its vibra- 
tions, or undulations, which enable us to behold 
its glorious rays. The spectroscope had been a 
mere blank but for the lines and blank spaces 
between, which represented the solar spectrum. 
It is not the electric current, but the alternate 
opening and closing of it, which communicates 
thoughts along the telegraph to the ends of the 
earth. The glories of the star-lit heavens had 
been all unknown to us but for the law of peri- 
odicity, which brings in night, declaring the glory 
of their Creator. Had not the law of periodicity 
prevailed in the geologic ages, upheaving the 
lowest-laid foundations of the earth, and so sub- 
jecting them to our observation, we could have 
known no more of the geology of the earth than 
we do of the history of tke Aztecs. Natural 
history would have been impossible but for the 
periodicity of plants and animals. In short, it 
is only by means of the great law of periodicity 
that God educates men and angels into the knowl- 
edge of his works. 

This work, of the education of men and angels 
into the knowledge and love of God, is now going 
on, and will progress until it be perfectly accom- 
plished. Its accomplishment fills God's soul with 
satisfaction. It is a joy to God's heart to listen 
to every angel, who returns to heaven from a voy- 
age of discovery to our earth, pour forth his 
eloquent descriptions of the wonders of God's 



38 The Working Gods Sabbath 

handiworks: of fruit and flower; of gaily-plumaged 
bird and wondrously wise insect; and of the great 
Father's bounteous provision for them all; chiefly, 
when he tells of man, and of man's rebellion, and 
of God's unspeakable gift, and of the unsearcha- 
ble riches of Christ bestowed on sinners, and of 
the repenting one guided home to glory by the 
Holy Ghost. All heaven resounds with hallelu- 
jahs, and God's soul is refreshed in the Sabbath of 
our earth. 

God's Sabbath-rest, then, is a profound reality; 
God's soul does enjoy the blessedness of the Sab- 
bath. The law of periodicity has its foundation in 
the depths of the divine nature. It is indispensa- 
ble to the accomplishment of the design of the 
universe. It underlies and conditions the exist- 
ence of all worlds. It precedes the law of gravi- 
tation in the order of reason. The law of chemical 
affinity is subordinate to it. All the processes of 
life are pulsations of periodicity. The human mind 
obeys its behests ; and the Divine Mind adapts 
his manifestations to its cycles. Periodicity is a 
fundamental law of nature, and of nature's God. 
And by so much as the great end of God in crea- 
tion excels the means by which he works it out, 
does the Sabbath of the soul excel the rest of the 
body. The working God's Sabbath is the model 
of the workingman's. 

Such being the deep foundation of the law of 
periodicity in the very nature of God, as well as 



And the Workingmaris, 39 

in the nature of the earth and man, we are pre- 
pared to consider its application to man by our 
Father in heaven as a most natural and benefi- 
cent provision. The reason given in Genesis, and 
repeated in the Fourth Commandment, why man 
should keep a Sabbath of rest after a week of 
labor, because our Father and Creator does so, 
is seen to be the most profound truth, the most 
cogent of all reasons. If God needs to enjoy a 
Sabbath-rest for the proper enjoyment of his 
works, much more does man. And the sweetest 
and best repose a man can enjoy is the rest of 
God — communion in his Father's blessedness. 

Here, at the very beginning of man's life, God 
gives us the true idea of religion : It is rest, re- 
pose, happiness, blessedness. ^*God blessed the 
Sabbath day" as a day of rest for his child. The 
first sunrise Adam and Eve witnessed was that 
of the blessed Sabbath. He sanctified it; set it 
apart from the common working -days of the 
week, as a day in which his children might come 
home, and sit around our Father's table, and enjoy 
his smile and be happy. The world began life 
with blessings from God. First, God blessed the 
dumb brutes, and the singing birds, and made them 
happy. Then God blessed Adam and Eve, and 
gave them all the earth. Now God blesses the Sab- 
bath day of rest and joy, as the first fruits of the rest 
and blessedness he himself enjoys, and invites us, 
his children, to enter into peace and rest with him. 



40 Rest or Riot? 



CHAPTER V. 

REST OR RIOT? 

In the previous chapter we demonstrated the 
necessity of the law of periodicity to the accom- 
phshment of God's design, of manifesting his 
glory to his intelligent creatures. That design 
imperatively demanded that the Creator should 
rest as well as work. The same principle still 
more imperatively imposes the law of periodic- 
ity upon human workers. We have shown the 
scientific sfanding of the Sabbath in the oxy- 
gen of our breath of Hfe; and we have shown 
the theological standing of the Sabbath in the 
Creator's method of revealing himself to man, in 
the intervals of his workings. The Sabbath, then, 
is not dependent upon any form of worship, or 
church institution, Jewish or Christian; but is a 
law of nature, sacred as that protecting the hfe 
of man, or the worship of God. 

The Sabbath is thus a sacred day, because it 
is, in the first place, a safeguard and protection of 
human life; and, in the second place, because it 
is indispensable to man's proper understanding 
and enjoyment of his life-work. Man needs the 
Sabbath rest, and the Sabbath worship, to pre- 



Rest or Riot? 41 



serve himself from sinking down into the drudg- 
ery of the brute, and from becoming a mere 
animal. On the Sabbath, he not only recuper- 
ates the oxygen in his blood, and the vigor of 
his body, but he remembers the fact that God is 
his Father, and that, as God's child, he is placed 
in the world to do the works of his Father. 
Whether these works be done in the mine or in 
the mountain, in the workshop or on the ocean 
wave, if done in obedience to God's will, they are 
as acceptable to God as the ruling of an empire. 

Thus the dignity and the divine origin of labor 
are asserted and preserved. The laborer who re- 
gards himself and his fellows as workers together 
with God, will not seek his enjoyment in the tavern, 
nor his companions among the drunken and pro- 
fane. He will walk worthy of his vocation. We 
hear, nowadays, a great deal about the conflict be- 
tween labor and capital, and many are terrified at 
the prospect of the dangers to society from the 
uprising of the ignorant and imbruted masses of 
mankind. I would not underrate these dan^-ers. 
But why are the workingmen ignorant and ani- 
malized? Because the world has degraded labor 
and the laborer, by taking away God's day of sacred 
rest and holy worship. 

Sabbath -breaking laborers are always lawless 
and brutal. God made labor as sacred as mar- 
riage, or as human life. Employers of labor have 
degraded it, just as Eastern despots have degraded 



42 Rest or Riot? 



marriage, and interfered with the holiness of human 
life. Railroad employers, above all others in our 
land, have trampled down the workingman and 
compelled him to seven-day drudgery. Is it won- 
derful that the men whom they have taught to de- 
spise one part of God's law should treat another 
part of that law with contempt? What law but 
the law of God constitutes the rights of the direct- 
ors to the property of the railroad? But surely 
the right of the laborer to his Sabbath rest, and to 
the Hfe of his body and of his soul, dependent on 
it, is far more sacred than that of the proprietor 
of the railroad to his rails and engines. If, then, 
the capitalist forces the laborer to drudge away his 
life in contempt of the law of God, need he won- 
der if that contempt, into which he has educated 
the drudge, extends itself to the laws of property 
as well as those of labor? The railroad owner 
teaches the laborer to break God's law to make 
money for him; need we wonder that the laborer 
will break God's law again when he thereby can 
make money for himself? The laborer must be 
taught, by his employer's example, reverence for 
the law of God; and especially for the Sabbath 
law. There is no possibility of delivering the 
world from the miseries of strikes, and riots, and 
communism, save a return to God's original insti- 
tution of the dignity of six days' labor, and the 
sacredness of the Sabbath rest. 

It is the great work of the Church to illustrate 



Rest or Riot? 43 



the blessedness of Sabbath rest to the weary, 
drudging world. **VVe who have believed do 
enter into rest/' It is our privilege and blessed- 
ness to imitate our Father's example, and to rest 
on the Sabbath from our daily labors, and enjoy 
the blessedness of communion with God in the 
contemplation of his works and his word, and in 
offering up to him the joyful worship of adoring 
souls. Sabbath rest, and Sabbath worship are the 
highest enjoym.ents of the believer on earth, and 
the clearest foretastes of the coming glory of com- 
munion with Christ in his kingdom. The mere 
bodily rest can not elevate and ennoble the work- 
ingman, any more than it elevates the working 
horse. God-hkeness is nurtured by the Sabbath 
of the souL 

In competition with God's mode of Sabbath rest 
and worship, the devil suggests Sabbath revelry. 
The Sunday steamboat excursion, the Sunday 
railroad train, the dancing-floor, the band of soul- 
stirring music, the popping of corks, and the fra- 
grance of golden wine, all combine to turn the 
soul away from God, and to keep it down to the 
things that are of the earth — earthy. Then follow, 
by an inevitable necessity, those that are sensual, 
and those that are devilish. Men, aye, and women, 
too, lose their sobriety, and their virtue and mod- 
esty. Seldom does a Sunday excursion return 
without its sacrifice to Satan of drunken men, and 
drunken women lying on the floor. Too often 



44 R^^i or Riot? 



the pistol, in the hands of the drunken Sabbath- 
breaker, ends his own Hfe, or that of his neighbor. 
The poor drudges upon the steamboats, the rail- 
roads, and in the saloons, and all the ministers to 
the pleasures of others, who must toil without a 
Sabbath rest, that the aristocracy of the dollar 
may play, are ground down by Egyptian bondage. 
The hard-worked stoker, or engineer, or conductor, 
as we have seen, expends twenty-five grammes of 
his life, in every day's work, more than he breathes 
in. God gave him the Sabbath to recuperate his 
vigor. But the Sunday excursionist comes on Sab- 
bath morning, and says: ''I want to go on a pic- 
nic. What care I for your life, or your children, 
who will be left orphans, and your wife a widow, 
when you are cut off in the midst of your days 
by Sabbath drudgery? What care I for your soul, 
excommunicated from all opportunity of attending 
church, or of learning to know and serve your 
God? I will enjoy my own pleasure, and I care 
nothing for your right to rest your weary limbs. 
I will enjoy my dance, and drink, and song. What 
care I for your poor drudging wife's, and tattered 
children's right to enjoy the cheer and comfort of a 
father's presence, one day in the week, at home? 
I can read my Bible, and, if I please, go to church, 
in the evening, and enjoy the sacred strains of 
music from the choir. But who cares for the souls 
of hard-handed, black-faced stokers and engineers? 
Has God made such people? Has he anyplace 



Rest or Riot? 45 



for them in heaven, among wealthy, well-dressed 
people? Ring the bell! All aboard! Now we 
are off for the Sunday picnic/' 

The Sabbath thus desecrated for the pleasure of 
money-spenders, and the gain of money-makers, 
by a large and respectable class of the community, 
what remains to hinder the remainder from follow- 
ing the example? We see, in Europe, that the re- 
sult of Sabbath revelry to the aristocracy is Sab- 
bath drudgery to the working man and woman. 
The dress-maker and milliner, the baker and con- 
fectioner, the tailor and hair-dresser, the singer and 
the actor and the opera-dancer, the groom and the 
cabman, and all the multitude of other tradesmen, 
are driven, by competition, into Sabbath labor — 
seven-day drudgery; and receive no more wages 
for the seven days' work than they formerly re- 
ceived for six. And so the weary, toil-worn, 
drudging world is cheated by Satan out of the 
day of sacred rest, and hurried breathless down to 
the grave. 

All who lend their countenance, and example, 
and presence to Sunday excursions are doing what 
in them lies to destroy the Sabbath — man's most 
precious inheritance from God. Were there no ex- 
cursionists, there would be no excursions. Every 
man and woman who takes part in one of these 
excursions, becomes responsible to God for all the 
drunkenness, profanity, lew^dness, and bloodshed 
to which such a high-handed violation of God's 



46 I^est or Riotf 



Liw invariably leads. An asscniblai^e to violate 
tho l\>urth i.\Mi\n\.uulnKMU is an nnlawful assenv 
blago, as nuich so as an assoniblaL^o convened to 
violate the Kighth ConimandnuMU by stealing, or 
burning a house. Indeed, it may be questioned 
whether the destruction of the Sabbath be not 
more dan^^erous to society than the destruction of 
the best house in this city. 

But it is replied that \'our Christian people go on 
Sunda\' excursions; that they own shares in the 
Sunday railroads and steamers; and, while their 
servants are thus drudging out their lives, as )'ou 
say, they are sitting in your pews, at your com- 
munion tables, and preaching in >'our pulpits. 

If that be true, I am very sorry to hear it — sorry 
for their own sakes, and sorry for the world's sake; 
for well 1 know that there is but one code of law 
for all men, and that God will tolerate no man in 
transgression of his law, because of his profession 
of religion. The Sabbath-breaking drudge, as we 
have seen, can not escape the curse of God; nor 
Will his Sabbath-breaking employer's wealth avail 
to excuse his transgression before Him who is no 



respecter of persons. On the contrary, his su- 
perior advantages will insure severer punishment. 
The servant who knew not his Lord's will, and did 
it not, shall be beaten with few stripes ; while he 
who knew his Lord's will, and did it not, shall be 
beaten with many stripes. 

Tliat the Sabbath-breakers of our land have ex- 



Rest 07- Rioti 47 



communicated tlicmsclvcs from the blessing of God 
is so plain that he who runs may read it. Lcjok 
at the Sabbath-breaking raih-oads — many in bank- 
ruptcy, and the rest running on the same down- 
grade. Look at the Sal)bath-breaking saloon- 
kcei)ers, and ihcir Ihinilics, treading the \)\\\\\ to 
the drunkard's grave. See the money made by 
the Sabbath breaking capitahsts — squandered in 
Htigation, or extravagance, or debauchery. And 
Hsten to the roaring of the Sabbath-breaking mobs 
on the liiHtops, and say: Is it a token of God's 
blessing upon a Sabbath-breaking city to have 
thousands of its people struggling, like wild beasts 
on a chain, to be let loose from all kiws of God 
and man? 

Be not deceived! God is not mocked, neither 
by infidels, nor by Christians. The law of the 
Sabbath rest, and Sabbath worship of the working- 
man is one of the fundamental laws of nature, 
which will avenge itself upon all transgressors. 
There is only one way to save the world from the 
terrible outburst of man's wicked passions, and 
that way is by teaching him reverence for the 
authority of God. God has graciously appointed 
the Sabbath for this purpose. Those who dese- 
crate the Sabbath sin against their own mercies, 
and destroy the only oi)portunity for their own, 
and for the world's, salvation from brutality and 
destruction. 

Let every one resolve that he will avail himself 



48 Rest or Riot? 



of God's blessed day of sacred rest. Let every 
one rest from all his daily labor, save as works of 
necessity or mercy demand his exertions ; for the 
Lord will have mercy before sacrifice. And let 
every child of God come home to his Father's 
house on Sabbath, and rest in God, meditating 
on the greatness, and goodness, and love, of his 
Father and his God, and trusting in him to pro- 
vide for all his wants, and praising him for salva- 
tion in our risen Lord. And let him be fully 
assured that, in this blessed Sabbath rest, he 
does now enjoy the pledge and foretaste of fuller 
fellowship with God, in the rest that remaineth for 
the people of God ; for Sabbath rest is soul bless- 
edness. 



Shall we Excha7ige our Afnerican Sabbath 49 



CHAPTER VI. 

SHALL WE EXCHANGE OUR AMERICAN SABBATH FOR 
A GERMAN SUNDAY? 

'*If thou turn away thy foot from the Sabbath, 
from doing thy pleasure on my holy day; and call 
the Sabbath a delight, the holy of the Lord, hon- 
orable; and shalt honor Him, not doing thine own 
ways, nor finding thine own pleasure, nor speak- 
ing thine own words: then shalt thou delight thy- 
self in the Lord; and I will cause thee to ride upon 
the high places of the earth, and feed thee with 
the heritage of Jacob thy father: for the mouth of 
the Lord hath spoken it." Isaiah Iviii. 13, 14. 

Religion is power. Ungodliness is weakness. 
The man who, in the struggle of life, has God 
against him, struggles against fearful odds. The 
nation that sets itself to overturn the moral gov- 
ernment of Jehovah must come to ruin. The city 
which obeys the laws of nature, and of nature's 
God, will be supported and aided by all the arrange- 
ments of the universe. These truths are not only 
asserted in Scripture, they are simply a more ex- 
panded form of the truth, that God reigns — a truth 
owned by every man possessed of common sense. 

Our text is a particular application of this general 



50 Shall we Exchange our A^ncrican Sabbath 

principle to one of the commands of God's law. 
While some of the ten commandments are the 
guardians of individual character and of personal 
property, and others of family government, the 
Fourth Commandment guards national religion — the 
basis of all political liberty, and of national pros- 
perity. 

The Fourth Commandment has always been op- 
posed. The avaricious man would drudge on for- 
ever to increase his gains, and grudges a weekly 
day of cessations of his accumulations ; the friv- 
olous and sensual desire to convert the weekly day 
of sacred rest into a day of festivity and revelry. 
These extremes meet, and combine to destroy the 
Sabbath rest, and to substitute a day of revelry for 
the sensual, and a day of labor and gain for the 
avaricious. The combination of the money-makers 
and revelers in Israel, in the days of Isaiah, was 
too successful ; and this prophet, after the example 
of his predecessors, raised his voice to reprove, 
exhort, and encourage his countrymen to a better 
life. He promised, in God's name, national honor 
and prosperity as the necessary result of national 
religion, exhibited in a reverent use of God's Sab- 
bath for his worship. He does not, in this place, 
declare all the consequences of national irreligion; 
nor is it necessary. The law of nature, for nations 
as well as individuals, is the law of moral gravita- 
tion. The man or the nation that tramples on 
God's laws forfeits his blessing and can not rise, 



For a German Sioidayf $1 

but must inevitably sink, slowly it may be, but 
surely, sink to ruin. The unvarying testimony of 
Scripture is, that all ungodly nations shall perish. 
The sad experience of the Hebrew nation con- 
firmed the predictions of the prophet. Disregard- 
ing their Sabbaths and their sanctuary, they speedily 
sunk into heathenism, with all its corruption of 
morals, selfishness, and disregard of the public 
good. They drowned in drunkenness and lewd- 
ness the religious faith which had inspired such 
deeds of heroism in defense of their altars and 
their homes, and made their little armies of patriots 
victors over the miUions of conscript slaves of their 
tyrant invaders. Thus reduced by their vices to 
the level of the surrounding nations, their few regi- 
ments of militia were ere long conquered by the 
superior numbers of the standing armies of the 
heathen, and the farmers of Palestine were made 
slaves to the conquerors, bound to the coffle chain, 
scourged across the plains of Mesopotamia, and 
compelled by the slave driver's whip to drudge 
from morn till night, without cessation, from one 
end of the year to the other ; longing in vain for 
that weekly Sabbath rest which they had so de- 
spised in their own land. And for seventy long, 
weary years, their land enjoyed its Sabbaths, while 
they enjoyed the punishment of their iniquity — 
the ceaseless seven-day drudgery of slaves, by 
which God taught them the value of his blessed 
Sabbath rest. 



5^ Siiall zve Exchange ozir American Sabbath 

When, through the mercy of God, their con- 
querors were conquered, and their captivity was 
removed, the freedmen remembered the lesson 
they had thus learned ; and, when they returned to 
their own land, or dispersed themselves in the 
great cities of the world, they observed their Sab- 
baths with such excessive particularity that Sab- 
bath-keeping became the most conspicuous of their 
national customs. The heathen satirists ridiculed 
them as Sabbath-keeping Jews. This was one of 
the chief influences which held them fast to their 
religious faith, and national hopes, amidst heathen 
and Christian idolators, and formed that national 
character which gives them to-day so great superi- 
ority over papal and infidel Europe. For we are 
not to judge of the Hebrew race by a handful of 
money-making shop-keepers, destitute of any God 
but the dollar. All the elements of national great- 
ness exist among them. Let us remember that 
Hebrew generals led the conquering armies of 
France, and that the great Napoleon was half He- 
brew; that Hebrew journalists control the news- 
paper press, and mold the public opinion of Europe; 
that Hebrew bankers control the national treasuries 
of the world, and dictate peace to the victorious 
Emperor of all the Russians ; that in the univer- 
sities and parliaments of France, Germany and 
England, the representatives of this people speak 
with authority; and that the scepter of the Empire 
on which the sun never sets is wielded to-day by 



For a German Sunday f 53 

one whose name attests his lineage — Benjamin de 
IsraeH — a Sabbath-keeping Hebrew. Surely the 
prophecy is fulfilled before our eyes. Israel rides 
upon the high places of the earth. Scattered by 
ungodliness, Israel regained its superiority to the 
sensual and degraded heathen by conscientious 
obedience to the moral law, and by the worship of 
God; and now this people, numerically the most 
insignificant, by its moral superiority, takes rank 
above all the other races of its native Asia, and on 
a footing of equality with the proudest races of Eu- 
rope. The Jews, then, are an illustrious instance 
of the power of national religion to exalt a nation. 
The prediction of our text, thus fulfilled in the 
alternate degradation and elevation of the Hebrews, 
is by no means exhausted in them. Like the laws 
of nature, the moral law of God is of world-wide 
apphcation. The Hebrew nation is an illustration 
of, not an exception to, God's method of govern- 
ing the nations. Thousands of years before the 
father of the Hebrews was born, the Sabbath was 
made for man. His physical frame was made so 
dependent on the day of weekly rest that in every 
day's work he breathes out an ounce of oxygen 
more than he inspires, and depends on the Sabbath 
rest to restore this exhausted breath of life. Every 
man needs the Sabbath worship of God also to en- 
able him to conquer the animalism of his nature, 
and to prevent him from sinking into ignorance and 
brutality, the grave of all godless nations. 



54 Shall we Exchange our American Sabbath 

The people of America are now assailed by 
temptations like those which seduced Israel to con- 
form to the customs of the surrounding heathen. 
Besides our own natural longing for pleasure, and 
the weakness of human nature in favor of present 
enjoyment rather than mental or moral improve- 
ment, we have to contend with a vast mass of for- 
eign sensuaHty, imported in the process of immi- 
gration. Multitudes, invited by our fertile soil and 
hospitable welcome, are flocking to our prairies and 
cities, who are ignorant alike of our history and 
our institutions, of the price which America has 
paid for the liberty which makes it the land of the 
people, and of the popular intelligence, morality 
and religion, which are the only conditions on 
which our liberty can be maintained. Born and 
educated under European despotism, they are igno- 
rant of the first principles of self-government, and 
delude themselves with the idea that republican 
institutions demand no higher intelligence or mo- 
rality from the people of America than what sufficed 
to the people governed by the police of the Em- 
peror, or the soldiers of the Kaiser. They desire 
to revel away the day of sacred rest as they were 
accustomed to do in France or Germany, instead 
of using it as God designed, and as our American 
institutions design, as the precious opportunity for 
cultivating their minds, and, so, elevating themselves 
above the degraded condition of the European 
people, from which they have been so glad to fly 



For a German Sunday? 55 

for refuge to America. They labor to import the 
very worst features of their degradation, to Ger- 
manize America, and to keep themselves, and to 
educate their children in, that ignoble animalisr^. 
which has reduced the working people of Europi^ 
to their present state of oppression, taxation, and 
poverty, by spending their Sabbaths in drinking, 
revelry and lewdness. 

In this course they have found fit leaders in the 
liquor dealers of our land. Since the day the first 
manufacturer of wine fell a victim to his own liquor, 
and bequeathed an inalienable destiny of degrada- 
tion and sensuality to his successors, alliance with 
every degradation of humanity has been the fatal 
condition of success in the liquor trade, and espe- 
cially with all degradations promoted by drunken, 
ness. The profits increasing with the consumption 
of liquor, they have a money interest in promoting 
drunkenness. And as experience shows that Sun- 
day revelry greatly promotes drinking, they have, 
with great unanimity, taken the lead in every move- 
ment for the desecration of the Sabbath, by con- 
verting it into a drinking-day instead of a day of 
rest and worship, as w^e have seen in the recent 
festival. With the working classes they have been, 
to a great degree, successful. The savage Indian 
of our own country, destitute of the comforts of a 
home, inspired by no historic memories of his 
nation, sustained by no hopes for the future of his 
tribe, looking upon his children as doomed to lives 



5 6 Shall we Exchange our American Sabbath 

of cold, and hunger, and subjugation, and to early 
death, and with only the faintest dreams of a happy 
hunting-ground in the spirit-land, not unnaturally 
grasps the whisky-bottle, and seeks in the excite- 
ment of a whirling brain, and in his momentary 
exaltation as a drunken big Indian, a brief escape 
from the misery of his life of barbarism. And the 
poor peasant or mechanic of Europe, surrounded 
there by the broad domains of an aristocracy own- 
ing the land from which he should raise his bread, 
compelled to toil from sunrise to sunset for twenty- 
five cents per day, with every article of consump- 
tion taxed half its value to sustain courts and armies 
in splendor, and with no prospects for his children 
but to become paupers or robbers, lies under the 
same temptation as the Indian, to seek oblivion 
of his misery in drunkenness. 

There are, however, a large number of persons 
whose minds are not so wholly sensual as to be sat- 
isfied with the mere animal gratification of drink, 
and with the alcoholic excitement of brain which it 
produces, and whose circumstances have enabled 
them to enjoy a little intellectual culture, and the 
capacity of being cheered by soul-inspiring music. 
It is one of the great humanities, that almost as 
soon as the infant draws its first nourishment from 
its mother's breast it is soothed to the sweet sleep 
of childhood by that most heavenly harmony, the 
mother's cradle song of love and peace. Thus 
rriusic comes to us consecrated by a baptism of 



For a German Sunday f * 57 



blessedness, and the child runs to meet the most 
simple musician as of kin to his best friend — as one 
who prolongs the blessedness of the childhood of 
the kingdom of heaven. 

As the education of the child progresses, the 
capacity for the enjoyment of music is developed, 
and may be increased to an almost infinite degree, 
until the child who delighted in the music of his 
rattle may compose and perform oratorios like 
HandeFs *' Messiah,'' yea, even take part in the 
anthems of choirs of angels. And it is agreed that 
we have thus in music a powerful influence for the 
elevation of humanity from the degradation of sen- 
sual animalism, and for the education of the people 
to a higher and a nobler life. For the multitude 
w^ill listen to a song who will not listen to a sermon, 
and the brass band will humanize thousands who 
have no taste for theology ; and it is better to lead 
people by their likings than to attempt to control 
them by their fears, and to make their religion 
enjoyable here rather than to clothe them with 
gloom in this world as the condition of happiness 
in heaven hereafter. The examples of France and 
Germany are held up before us, and we are invited 
here in America to devote our Sabbaths to the 
worship of God in nature's temples, under the 
shady trees, to the music of the brass bands, and 
gay processions and parades, with fluttering flags, 
and joyous songs, and merry dances; and thus 
make sure of happiness here, at least as much as 



58 Shall we Exchange our American Sabbath 

we may, as the best pledge of a happy hereafter. 
By every variety of vituperation of our Puritan Sab- 
bath, and of commendation of the French Sunday 
revelry, we are admonished to abandon the insti- 
tutions of our American society, and to transplant 
ourselves to those which have framed the manners, 
and so the liberties, of the people of Europe. 

This proposal has not only been made, but has 
been actually, on a large scale, carried into practice 
in our own city last Sabbath. The makers of liquor 
and the makers of music combined their energies, 
and barrels of beer and brass bands united to pro- 
mote the worship of Bacchus, and to disturb the 
worship of God, in Inwood Park, during the day; 
and as night began to throw her veil over the face 
of blushing heaven, the gas-lights revealed to the 
reporters glimpses of the shameless lewdness which 
has rendered the name of our city a reproach 
throughout the Union, as practicing indecencies 
which would not be tolerated for an hour in Paris 
or Vienna. This is the specimen of the German 
and French Sunday revelry presented to us in ex- 
change for our American Sabbath by the conduct- 
ors of the Saengerfest, inaugurated by a pubHc 
procession of our municipal authorities, in presence 
of the children of our public schools. 

We are thus absolved from the duty of arguing 
the weakness of music to control the passions of 
mankind, or of demonstrating by historical ex- 
amples that its sweetest strains have as often en- 



For a German Sunday? 59 

livened the orgies of Bacchus as solemnized the 
worship of God; and that music is just whatever 
men make of it, a blessing or a curse. We have 
seen here how it is prostituted by drunkard-makers 
as a barmaid to sell their beer, and by harlots to 
attract their customers. We can not separate this 
disgraceful revelry into its component parts ; it is 
all one combined partnership in vice. The beer 
bemuddles the music, and the Sabbath revelers at 
once insult God, disturb their neighbors, and de- 
grade themselves. 

What do the American people think of the Ger- 
man Sunday? The very first impression this ex- 
hibition makes upon every beholder is that it is at 
variance with the existing institutions of this coun- 
try; that it is foreign and anti- American. 

Our American Sabbath is the most distinctive 
social institution of our Republic, the day for the 
public education of our people in their duties to 
God, and to each other, a day regarded as sacred 
for that purpose by the founders of our common- 
wealth, by the laws of our States, by the decisions 
of our courts, and by the proclamations and ex- 
amples of our chief magistrates. It is a national 
institution, believed to be essential to the perma- 
nence of our RepubHcan liberties. We are now 
asked to remove the fence of sacred authority which 
has so^long protected it, and to lend our aid to 
a number of foreigners, who propose to erect over 
its ruins a temple of pleasure, such as the despots 



6o Shall we Exchange our American Sabbath 



of Europe erect for their slaves, where they may 
drink and dance, and forget the chains which bind 
them in helpless slavery. 

The Sabbath is the oldest of our American insti- 
tutions. The planting of this free Republic was 
preceded by an act of homage to the Sabbath and 
to the God of the Sabbath, which can never be for- 
gotten by the people of America. When the little 
band of tempest-tossed emigrants, long confined in 
the cramped recesses of the Httle bark, the May- 
flower, landed on Friday, the 2d of December, 
1620, they had neither a roof to shelter their chil- 
dren from the falling snow, nor a breastwork to 
protect them from the arrows of the hostile Indians ; 
yet, with one consent, the Governor and people 
rested from labor on the Sabbath, according to the 
commandment, trusting to the protection and bless- 
ing of the God of the Sabbath. The first nation 
on earth which was ever founded upon a written 
constitutional compact of Hberty was thus planted 
upon Sabbath observance, amidst the leafless for- 
ests and falling snows of a New England winter. 
The Sabbath and the nation which survived such a 
nursing are not likely to be swept away by any 
modern thunder-storm. 

This precedent of Sabbath observance has been 
followed by all the other States. In every one of 
the United States, save Louisiana, founded by 
French Papists, the Sabbath has been recognized 
as a day of sacred rest. While no compulsory 



For a German Sunday f 6 1 

religious duties are prescribed, the laws forbid 
common labor and noisy revelry on that day, as in- 
fringing the public peace and right to rest, guar- 
anteed to man and beast by our Creator. The laws 
of this State of Ohio are no exception to those of 
other States, forbidding, under penalty, all that 
common labor in driving vehicles, running steam- 
boats and railroads, selling liquors and refresh- 
ments, and all that noisy revelry of bands and 
processions, disturbing worshiping assemblies, 
which formed the prominent features of last Sab- 
bath's revelry. The constitutionality of our Sab- 
bath laws has been again and again tested in the 
Supreme Courts of the various States, and uni- 
formly affirmed through a long train of decisions. 
That performance, therefore, w^as a barefaced at- 
tempt to overbear, wdth a high hand, the well- 
known ancient, common and statute laws of our 
land, and to terrify the magistrates, by the multi- 
tude of law-breakers, from attempting to maintain 
our American institutions; and, as such, it demands 
the stern reprobation of every loyal American. 

But our principal objection to this inauguration 
of Sunday revelry is, that it is utterly ungodly and 
profane, and degrading to the people, also destruc- 
tive of our Republic. It directly assails and abol- 
ishes the worship of God, so far as its attendants 
are concerned, and it degrades the thousands en- 
gaged in ministering to the pleasures and vices of 
the revelers into seven-day drudges, destitute of 



62 Shall we Exchange our American Sabbath 



manhood and character. The Sabbath, God's day 
of rest and worship, for the elevation of the people, 
is thus perverted into Satan's Sabbath of sensuality, 
drunkenness, and lewdness. Our American Sab- 
bath is thus basely corrupted into a German Sun- 
day, with all the fiddhng, drinking, and drum- 
beating by which the tyrants of Europe contrive to 
amuse their ignorant, demorahzed serfs, so as to 
keep them down in that state of ignorance ani 
slavery which they regard as the only proper con- 
dition of common people. 

That high moral character which is the truest 
and most endearing glory of nations, bears, a close 
connection and relationship with the cultivation of 
religion and the observance of the Sabbath. Where 
the Sabbath is spent as a day of revelry, the hard 
v/orking classes are deprived of their only oppor- 
tunity of worship and instruction, and speedily 
degenerate into mere animals, ignorant of God, and 
acknowledging no restraints of conscience — the 
dangerous classes of European cities. The middle 
and higher classes also, seduced by these spectacles 
from the house of God, lose the habit of worship, 
and infidelity and atheism grow rankly over the 
ruined temple. Justice McLean, of the Supreme 
Court, stated a historical truth which admits of no 
exceptions when he said: '* Where there is no 
Christian Sabbath there is no Christian morality, 
and, without this, free government can not be long 
maintained.'* 



For a German Stmday? 63 

Sabbath observance is closely connected with 
morality. The statistics of public morals show that 
the Sabbath-breaking countries are the most Hcen- 
tious, and the Sabbath-keeping countries the most 
moral. Thus, in London, the illegitimate births are 
only 4 per cent, of the whole ; but, in Paris, they 
are 33; in Munich, 48; in Vienna, 51; or, on an 
average of France and Germany, ten times as 
numerous in the Sabbath-breaking, as in the Sab- 
bath-keeping countries of Europe. In Paris 3,000 
foundlings yearly attest the absence of natural 
affection in parents, produced by the prevalence of 
poverty and licentiousness. The character of the 
theatrical exhibitions, of the most popular revels, 
furnishes another evidence of the demoralization of 
the French and German people. And the exhi- 
bitions made in the Sunday theaters of Cincinnati, 
and Chicago, and San Francisco, proclaim to heaven 
and earth the brutish and shameless demoralization 
consequent on Sunday revelry. And the Saenger- 
fest picnic last Sabbath evening, as described in the 
daily payers, closed with an exhibition of lewdness 
worthy of the youths of Sodom. 

This deplorable state of individual demoralization 
always necessitates rigid restrictions of personal 
liberty. So universally feared is the licentiousness 
of the people on the continent of Europe that every 
possible restriction is put upon traveling. The pass- 
port system, which we could barely tolerate during 
the actual prevalence of war, and then only within 



64 Shall we Exchmige our American Sabbath 

the territory occupied by the army, is the standing 
rule of all Europe during the profoundest peace. 
But peace in Europe is only an empty name. Mil- 
lions of armed men are kept in pay, and millions 
more in reserve, ready to cry havoc, less against 
foreign enemies than against the foQs of their own 
household ; ever ready to rise in rebellion against 
any who may be pointed out as the authors of their 
miseries. The tyranny of the Emperor, or the 
Kaiser, is felt to be less dreadful than the anarchy 
of the Red Republic. One-half of Europe is thus 
in arms against the other, and this is called the 
balance of power. Public liberty in such a state 
of society is impossible. 

The connection between despotism and Sunday 
revelry on the continent is not accidental, nor is it 
merely by chance that you behold liberty and Sab- 
bath observance flourishing together in England. 
There is a profound relationship between intelli- 
gence and freedom. MoraHty and liberty are sis- 
ters. The despot fears an intelligent people. * ' Yon 
Cassius thinks too much/' is the thought of all 
Caesars. Give the slaves a fiddle and a festival, 
a show and a procession, on their hoHday; let them 
drink and dance, and go to work again the next 
day, and they will never become capable of self- 
government. The wearied body jades the mind, 
and the toilworn laborer craves his pipe and his 
sleep after the day's work is done ; there is no time 
nor taste for studying political rights on the work- 



For a German Sttndayf 65 

ing-days. The Sabbath is the workingman's school- 
day, to learn his native equality with the nobles of 
earth, his equal rights before the God of heaven, 
and the hundred achievements of the plebeian 
princes with which the Bible stimulates mankind to 
do and dare for the common weal. 

A people assembling from Sabbath to Sabbath 
in the sanctuary, to learn the lofty lessons of their 
relationship to the God of heaven as their common 
Father, and of the equal obligation of his law upon 
all ranks and degrees of men, and, by this knowl- 
edge of the truth, made free from the bondage of 
the fear of man, can not be indefinitely held in 
slavery. With a true instinct, the despot, King 
James, published his '* Book of Sports," command- 
ing fencing, archery, games, and dances on the 
Sabbath, well knowing that, could he succeed in 
debauching the people of England and Scotland 
into French Sunday revelry, he would have no 
trouble in keeping them under French despotism. 
The English and Scottish people rejected the des- 
pot and his Sunday sports, and asserted their Sab- 
bath and their Hberty. They have continued to 
retain their Sabbath and their liberty, while France 
and Germany retain their Sunday festivals, their 
standing armies, their spies, their passports, and 
Bismarck. 

The connection of the Sabbath with liberty is 
fundamental. Ignorance and vice among the peo- 
ple are the conditions for the existence of despot. 



66 Shall zi't Exchange otir American Sabbath 

ism ; intelligence and morality are the indispensable 
Qonditions of liberty. But popular intelligence de- 
nj^ids education; not merely the ability to read 
5nd write, but the time and inclination to read and 
write somethinof useful and elevatinsT. The Sab- 
bath is the workingman's only school-day. All the 
week he must toil for his dailv bread, and that of 
his children. At night he is too wearied to read 
or study serious subjects. The blessed Sabbath 
brings him time to think, and invites him to think 
on the most elevating themes — the universal father- 
hood of God and brotherhood of man; the equality 
of all men before God ; the universal obligation of 
God's moral law alike on prince and peasant ; the 
common salvation of all mankind through Christ; 
that judgment seat of God, who is no respecter of 
persons, before which master and servant, ruler 
and subject, must soon appear to give an account 
of the deeds done in the body; and the coming of 
our Lord Jesus, in the clouds of heaven, with his 
mighty angels and risen saints, to abolish every or- 
ganization of transgressors, and establish his ever- 
lasting kingdom of love, and righteousness, and 
peace on the earth. Men educated in these truths 
can not become slaves of despots, but have ever 
been free. 

0\\ the other hand, let the working people spend 
their Sabbaths and their wages in revelry, and re- 
turn on Monday to the toils of the week as igno- 
rant of their rights, and as unfit for their duties, as 



For a Germa7i Sunday? 6y 

they were, and let their lives be spent in alternate 
drudgery and revelry, and they become the dupes 
of demagogues, who flatter their pride and abuse 
their ignorance, and make them the tools of their 
factious designs. Party strife speedily becomes en- 
raged to blood-shedding, and the Repubhc becomes 
a Mexico of perpetual revolutions, until, wearied of 
the strife and longing for peace, the people cast 
themselves at the feet of any military dictator able 
to protect them from the drunken mob. 

These are not theories ; they are inductions from 
experience. The futile attempts which have re- 
peatedly been made by the people of Europe to 
establish republican governments have convinced 
all wise observers, that an ignorant and Hcentious 
people are not capable of such an achievement. 
When aroused by the declamations of demagogues, 
the waves of popular fury can overwhelm the 
abuses of centuries; but a mob has no constructive 
capacity. The fundamental principles of self-gov- 
ernment are unknown to men who have never 
learned the habit of self-control, by obedience to 
the only power which ever could control human 
passions. After a brief but satisfactory experiment 
of their own incapacity for self-government, the 
people of France, of Italy, of Spain, of Germany, 
have instinctively looked around for some despot or 
other to govern them, and have knelt before the 
Bonaparte, or the Bismarck, who proved himself 
capable of conquering them. The prevalence of 



68 SJiall ive Exchange our American Sabbath 



despotic aristocratic governments in Europe is art 
unanswerable proof of the incapacity of its people 
to win and to wear freedom. 

Europe was once proud of the Republic of the 
Netherlands. The story of the brave Netherlanders 
has been often told ; how they took refuge for lib- 
erty, and defended their Republic against Spanish 
tyranny and Popish cruelty, amidst the morasses 
of the Rhine, below the level of the ocean ; cutting 
their dykes and drowning their country to save their 
liberty, the liberty of the only free country in 
Europe, the only land which could give a refuge 
to our own persecuted Covenanting and Puritan 
ancestors, and the only country capable of furnish- 
ing a deliverer to England in her hour of anarchy 
and distress. This brave Republic of the Nether- 
lands was a Sabbath-keeping nation, until French 
infidelity and French tyranny overpowered the 
religion and the liberty of the people,' and French 
armies forced upon them the decades instead of the 
Sabbath, and the Empire's satrap King instead 
of the President elected by the nation. The Sab- 
bath and the Republic went down together before 
the infidel tyrant of France, and the feeble kingdom 
of Holland now lies at the mercy of any invader. 

The only considerable free State in Europe to- 
day is Britain — the only nation where the voice 
of the people controls the action of the govern- 
ment, and where the government is administered 
with some good measure of regard for the welfare 



fior a Gennaii Sunday f 69 

of the people, and where the general prosperity 
and industry rest on so broad a basis as to give 
promise of stability. The northern extremity of 
Great Britain, distinguished by a more rigorous 
climate, a less productive soil, and a more scanty 
population than the southern, has distinguished 
itself beyond all the rest of the world for the 
intelligence and enterprise of its sons. The names 
of Mackenzie and Frazer mark the rivers of our 
own continent, while Livingstone has explored the 
hitherto inaccessible interior of Africa; and wher- 
ever a steam-engine propels a mill or an ocean 
steamship, the name of James Watt is commem- 
orated as one of Scotland's benefactors to the civ- 
ihzed world. And Scotland has been distinguished 
above all the nations for its sacred Sabbaths. 
Amidst the overthrow of kingdoms, and the wreck 
of nationalities, England bravely defied the despot 
who sought to enslave the youth of Europe by the 
conscription of France, and the slaughter of three 
millions of the people of Europe. By her indomit- 
able energy and wise counsels, no less than by the 
vast resources of her industrious people, Britain 
succeeded in combining the powers of Europe, and 
in delivering mankind from Napoleonism, on the 
field of Waterloo, and she has since been regarded 
as one of the arbiters of the destiny of the world. 
Need I tell you that this England is a Sabbath- 
keeping nation? Count de Montalembert declares 
his astonishment at beholding all the vast ma- 



70 Shall we Exchange our American Sabbatti 

chinery of England's commerce — her docks, and 
warehouses, and shops, and streets — ceasing from 
labor on the Sunday, as the most remarkable phe- 
nomenon which the Continental traveler witnesses, 
and traces the superior prosperity and peacefulness 
of England to the habits of order and religion thus 
engendered. 

We shall, however, here be reminded of France 
and Germany; both, it is said, powerful peoples, 
and yet both devoted to Sunday revelry. 

Let us look at France, then, as an example of a 
republic to be envied by America. How would 
you like to have the French conscription extended 
over the United States every year, and every 
seventh young man drawn, and compelled to serve 
in the army? When only one man in twenty was 
demanded of New York, the draft riots nearly con-- 
vulsed the country. The conscription is too great 
a price to pay for French Sunday revelry. But 
there is no help for it. If we descend to French 
frivolity and sensuality, there is no escaping French 
military despotism. 

But we shall be informed that it is a German 
Sunday which we are invited to observe, and that 
Germany is now the leading power of Europe. 

Well, then, how would the American people like 
to have every young man taken from home and 
compelled to serve three years in the army, and 
refused permission to marry or to emigrate unless 
he shows that he has fulfilled this conscription? 



For a German Sunday f 71 

And when he has fulfilled this military service, 
what liberty does the Kaiser's serf enjoy? Imagine 
to yourself our American Secretary of State going 
before Congress, and asking an enactment like the 
Bismarck Bill, to punish any member of Congress 
who should speak disrespectfully of the President, 
or of the Administration. Is that the popular Hb- 
erty to which Americans are asked to degrade 
themselves? That the Chancellor should dare to 
propose such a bill demonstrates the utter degra- 
dation of the people. America, with its Puritan 
Sabbath, is a better country for the people than 
Germany, with its Sunday revelry. 

It is unnecessary to dilate on the prosperity of our 
own land, sufficiently attested by the resort of hund- 
reds of thousands of the people of Europe and Asia 
to our shores ; nor on the moral and political influ- 
ence of this young republic, which makes the heart 
of the oppressed of every clime exult at the sight of 
the American flag, and which has exalted the min- 
isters of American commerce, even in the most 
remote cities of Asia, into protectors and deliverers 
of the victims of tyranny. But it is in this argu- 
ment of great importance to assert emphatically 
the religious character of our country, as the nat- 
ural and historical basis of our nation's greatness, 
and of her respect for the Sabbath, as both the 
expression of American religion and the grand 
instrument of its extension and support. This is 
the more necessary that a portion of our foreign 



^2 Shall we Excha7ige otir American Sabbath 

population deceive themselves with the idea that 
because no particular form of religion is supported 
by taxation, and because the Constitution forbids 
compulsory enactments of creeds or worship, we 
must therefore be, as a nation, atheistical, and be 
bound to treat God's law with contempt. 

This is a great mistake. Our Supreme Courts 
have again and again affirmed Christianity to be 
the basis of our common law, and the history 
of our country shows the particular and prominent 
regard of the founders and heroes of our Republic 
for the Sabbath, which is the public embodiment 
of our Christianity. From the first planting of the 
Colonies down to the latest refusal of our Chief 
Magistrate to transact business on the Sabbath, we 
behold a general recognition of the sacred day, 
which the Ruler of nations has commanded to be 
kept holy. 

The occasional exceptions of public ostentatious 
Sabbath-breaking have been so marked with dis- 
aster as to speak even more distinctly the great 
national lesson of the folly and punishment of Sab- 
bath-breaking. In this connection it is necessary to 
refer, and a mere reference must suffice, to the disas- 
ters of the attacking party in the Sabbath battles of 
Quebec, Monmouth, Lake Champlain and New Or- 
leans, in the war of the Revolution, and to the still 
fresh recollections of Bethel and Bull Run. It is 
not by chance that so many Sabbath marches, cam- 
paigns and battles, during our late war, ended in con- 



For a Germa?i Simdayf 73 

fusion ; and it is not the part of wisdom never to 
learn by experience that God reigns, and means to 
enforce his laws. Nor are we wise to ignore con- 
temptuously the disasters which have befallen 
cities in times of peace, at the hands of Sabbath 
revelers. Chicago will long remember that fatal 
Sabbath evening when, in procuring milk-punch 
for revelers, the fire was kindled which laid that 
city in ashes before morning. Even men who do 
not believe in God must admit that Sunday revelry 
is unlucky. 

To conclude our discussion, we have seen that 
Sunday revelry promotes drunkenness, lewdness, 
and ignorance, and prepares the people to become 
the dupes of demagogues, and to submit to the 
tyranny of despots; that the only nations which 
enjoy liberty and prosperity to-day, namely. Great 
Britain and America, are Sabbath-keeping nations ; 
and that the attempt of Sunday revelers to over- 
bear our American Sabbath laws with a high hand 
is a disloyal attack upon our American institutions, 
which, if successful, would be disastrous; most of 
all to the people who make it, not knowing what 
they do. No intelligent American, educated in the 
principles of Washington or Lincoln, would assail 
the American Sabbath. 

We would thence infer the duty, and appeal 
to every Am.erican citizen loyal to republican insti- 
tutions to perform it, of laboring to instruct the 
masses of our people in the dependence of liberty 



74 Shall we Exchange our American Sabbath^ etc. 

upon religion, that they may refrain from such 
suicidal attacks upon the safeguards of our national 
liberty, and may become the willing defenders of 
the Sabbath, the workingman's day of rest, edu- 
cation, and worship, and God's blessed pledge of 
our nation's prosperity and honor. American lib- 
erty stands or falls with the American Sabbath. 



The Lord's Day. 75 



CHAPTER VII. 

THE lord's day. 

''I WAS IN THE Spirit on the Lord's Day.'' — 
Revelation i. 10. 

In the previous chapters we considered the sci- 
entific standing of the Sabbath as the most import- 
ant apphcation of the great law of periodicity — 
the law which controls all the movements of heaven 
and earth. Then we traced the blessedness of its 
repose to the bosom of God— the God of peace 
and joy. Let us now ascertain the day of the 
week most suitable to be consecrated as the occa- 
sion of such benediction. We shall find it in 
the first day of the week, the day of the commemo- 
ration of the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ 
from the dead, as the pledge that every true 
Christian shall likewise arise from the grave to a 
hfe eternal in the kingdom of God. 

The Lord's day, being the first day of the week, 
is not the same day as that observed by the Jews, 
which was the seventh day of the week, or Satur- 
day. And some Christians also beheve that the 
Fourth Commandment requires them to observe 
the seventh day of the week, or Saturday. They 
are known as Seventh-Day Baptists, and submit 
to a great deal of inconvenience and loss from 



^6 The Lord's Day. 

their conscientious obedience to their ideas of duty. 
Their conscientiousness deserves all honor, in an 
age when multitudes despise every consideration 
but gain. But their zeal for God is not according 
to knowledge; and their endurance of loss for 
Christ's sake ought to be directed so as to pro- 
mote, rather than diminish the honors of his res- 
urrection. They think the Fourth Commandment 
obliges them to rest on Saturday. 

The Fourth Commandment, however, does not 
command the observance of the seventh day of the 
week, called Saturday, nor of any particular day of 
the week. Its words are: '* Remember the Sab- 
bath day, to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou labor, 
and do all thy work: but the seventh day is the Sab- 
bath of the Lord thy God : in it thou shalt not do 
any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy 
manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, 
nor thy stranger that is within thy gates : for in six 
days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and 
all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: 
wherefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and 
hallowed it." Here the Sabbath is defined as a 
day of rest after six days of labor; but no par- 
ticular day of the week is specified in this place. 
Indeed, no particular day could be specified here, 
because the reason given could not apply to any 
specific day. The reason given for man's resting 
one day in seven is, that God does so. But God's 
Sabbath, as we have seen, has lasted from the crea- 



The Lord's Day, 77 

tion of man till this time, and may last a great 
while longer. Therefore he could not have said, 
''Remember Saturday to keep it holy, for God 
labored on Monday, and Tuesday, and the other 
days, and rested on Saturday." This would not 
have been an accurate account of God's method of 
observing the law of periodicity ; and so God does 
not make such a blunder. What he does, and 
what he commands us to do, is to observe a day 
of rest after six days of labor. What particular 
day that shall be he shows elsewhere. 

There is also a geographical reason, as well as a 
geological one, forbidding the specification of a 
particular day of the week in the moral law, which 
was to be binding upon all mankind, in every part 
of the world. Though it is probable Moses did 
not know it, it is certain that God, who made the 
world, and spake the Fourth Commandment, did 
know, very well, that the world he had made was 
a globe, and that the same day which would be 
Saturday at Chatham Island and New Zealand to 
voyagers coming from the West, would be Friday to 
voyagers coming from the East. Had God then 
said, ''Remember Saturday to keep it holy,'' he 
would have given a commandment impossible to 
be obeyed by the people living beyond the one 
hundred and eightieth meridian. But by prescrib- 
ing every seventh day, the moral law remains, like 
God's other laws, universal. 

But it is urged that he has shown mankind 



78 The Lord's Day. 

what particular day to observe — at the first institu- 
tion to Adam; afterward at the giving of the 
manna; and thereafter by the Sabbath worship of 
the tabernacle and the synagogue, down to the 
coming of the Lord, who observed the Jewish 
Sabbath, which, it is not doubted, was Saturday, 
the seventh day of the week. It is argued, that 
this concurrence of authorities obliges our con- 
sciences to the observance of the precise day thus 
indicated by Divine authority and example, at least 
in that half of the world where such observance of 
the exact day is possible. 

We grant, without any cavil, that the seventh 
day of the week, or Saturday, was the day desig- 
nated to the Hebrews, and observed by our Lord, 
as one obedient to the law of Moses, and that the 
seventh day should be observed accordingly by 
Christians as their weekly Sabbath, unless another 
day has been appointed by the same authority, and 
its observance instituted in the same manner, as 
that of the primeval Sabbath; namely, by the 
divine example of holy rest and benediction upon 
that day. And we are prepared to proceed to 
show such an appointment of the Lord's Day, or 
first day of the week. But, before proceeding 
further in this direction at this moment, we must 
meet a powerful band of opponents on the other 
hand, who deny any divinely authorized Christian 
Sabbath. 

A large number of writers, and a larger number 



The Lord's Day. 79 

of Sabbath-breakers, deny any divine obligation of 
the Sabbath upon Christians. They allege, that it 
is merely a part of the law of Moses, and so was 
done away by the coming of Christ, with the other 
types and shadows of that Hebrew ritual. They 
cite Paul's allegations to the Galatians, about ''the 
law being our schoolmaster to bring us to Christ, 
and that now, Christ being come, we are no longer 
under a schoolmaster." They quote the example 
of our Savior, working his miracles on the Sabbath, 
and declaring that ''the Sabbath was made for 
man, and not man for the Sabbath." They cite 
Paul's command to the Colossians ii. 16, 17: 
"Let no man, therefore, judge you in respect of 
meat or drink, or of an holy day, or of the new 
moon, or of the Sabbath days; which are a shadow 
of things to come, but the body is of Christ." 
And they quote the language of the Continental 
reformers, of Calvin, and especially of Martin Lu- 
ther, declaring, with all the energy of his nature, 
against the imposition of a multitude of holy days 
upon the people by the Romish Church; and, in 
proof m. her right to do'^so, alleging the Lord's 
Day as instituted by her authority. Luther called 
upon the people to cast off all such claims to 
church authority over the conscience as antichris- 
tian. And they place the observance of the Lord's 
Day as a day of public worship, and of so much 
rest as may be needful for that purpose, merely 
upon the ground of public convenience and civil 



8o The Lord's Day. 



law; denying all church authority, and all divine 
obligation of the Sabbath upon Christians. 

But this style of declamation against the Sab- 
bath as merely a Jewish ordinance, appears utterly 
absurd when we recognize it as one of the laws of 
nature. You might just as well say that the law 
of gravitation was a Jewish ordinance, or that the 
law of marriage was a Jewish ordinance, repealed 
by Christ, as that Christ repealed the law of period- 
icity, by which the workingman expends twenty- 
five grammes of oxygen more than he breathes in 
during every working day. There is nothing na- 
tional in this law — Jew and Gentile, infidel and 
Christian, are equally under this law of periodicity, 
and must rest on Sabbath, or die in the middle of 
their days. Christ came not to destroy the law of 
periodicity, but to fulfill it; which he did by enter- 
ing into his rest on his Sabbath ; namely, the first 
day of the week. 

Neither did Christ abolish the religious use of 
the Sabbath. To every reader of the Gospels it 
must appear the very climax of absurdity to assert 
that Christ, finding mankind too rehgious, set him- 
self to deliver them from their extreme godliness, 
and encouraged them to desert the synagogue for 
the tavern and the dance-house, on the Sabbath. 
Yet that is in substance the argument of those who 
plead that Christ abolished the divine authority 
of the Jewish Sabbath, and gave the Christian 
Church nothing in it3 stead; whereas the public 



The Lord's Day, 8 1 

worship of God is one of the imperative wants 
of the human soul, demanding some fixed com- 
mon season. Christ could no more have abolished 
the weekly Sabbath than he could have abolished 
the public worship. On the contrary, he came not 
to destroy, but to fulfill the law in general, and the 
law of the Sabbath especially. 

Let us consider our Lord's treatment of the Sab- 
bath law. Like the other laws of God, it had been 
grossly abused by the addition of a multitude of 
senseless traditions by the Scribes. These tra- 
ditions of the Scribes have been accepted by Broad 
Church writers as of the same authority as the law 
of God; and our Lord's refusal of them has been 
perverted into his denial of the Sabbath. But that 
these traditions were God's law, or binding on men, 
was the very thing our Lord denied. He never 
allowed the traditions of men to be of any author- 
ity in religion. He vindicated his healing of the 
man with the withered hand on the ground that it 
is lawful to do good on the Sabbath day. He 
proved the right of his disciples, when ministering 
to him, to pluck, and rub, and eat ears of wheat, 
as superior to that of the priests to kill sacrifices in 
the temple. And he asserted that ^^the Sabbath 
was made for the man, and not the man for the 
Sabbath;" that is to say, the Sabbath is not a mere 
perishable ordinance, but was made for the first 
man, Adam, and for all his children, of every 
nation, in all generations, as one of the laws of 



82 The Lord's Day. 



nature, and therefore a source of blessing to all the 
sons of men. ''Therefore/' he argues, because 
of this world-wide and universal interest of all men 
in it, ''the Son of Man is Lord also of the Sab- 
bath/' It is one of the means put into his hand 
for the bestowal of grace and salvation upon man- 
kind. While other lords may glory in their title 
to work their drudges all the week," the title in 
which Jesus glories is that which proclaims him 
the Lord of rest, and peace, and blessedness — 
the Lord of the Sabbath day. 

Accordingly, you find that our Lord honored 
the Sabbath, not only by attending the synagogue, 
and singing praise to God in the midst of his 
brethren, and publicly reading the Scriptures, and 
expounding them to the people, but also by mul- 
tiplying his miracles of mercy on that day, bestow- 
ing his salvation on the diseased bodies, as well as 
reviving the sin-sick souls of men. Thus he pro- 
claimed to all the weary and dying sons of men 
that, as Lord of the Sabbath, he continued to bless 
and sanctify it to his poor suffering creatures. The 
Son of Man thus blessed and sanctified the Sabbath 
in the highest degree, by making it the day of sal- 
vation to the bodies and souls of his brethren, the 
rest of the sons of men. It is not the son of Abra- 
ham, but the Son of Man, who is the Lord of the 
Sabbath. 

Now this honor put upon the Sabbath by our 
Lord IS decisive against the notion that he designed 



The Lord's Day. 83 

to destroy it. If you see one of your neighbors 
cleaning out his house, sweeping out the dirt, white- 
washing the ceihng, frescoing the walls, painting 
the doors and windows, and stopping the leaks in 
the roof, and putting on a new door-plate, with his 
name upon it, do you think such repairs and im- 
provements denote his design to pull down that 
house next month? And can we for a moment 
suppose that our Lord would have taken all the 
pains he did to vindicate himself against the charge 
of Sabbath-breaking, to clear the Sabbath of the 
corruptions of the Scribes, and to inscribe his 
own name and authority upon it, as the Lord 
of the Sabbath, had he designed next year to 
abolish it? 

That Christ, as Lord of the Sabbath, claims and 
exercises the right to choose the particular day on 
which it is to be observed, is not denied by any 
one. The only question is as to what particular 
day he has chosen. And the Seventh-day Chris- 
tians demand a commandment to observe the first 
day of the w^eek, such as, they say, was given for 
the seventh day, in the Fourth Commandment. 

But we have seen that the Fourth Command- 
ment does not specify what day we should observe, 
but fixes one day in seven. And, moreover, the 
Sabbath w^as not instituted by the Fourth Com- 
mandment, but was observed twenty-five centuries 
before the law. And, finally, the Sabbath was not 
instituted by any commandment, but by God's 



84 The Lord's Day. 



own example of rest; which is as superior to a 
command as deeds are to words. 

It is alleged, however, that we have the example 
of our Lord himself resting in the grave on the 
seventh-day Sabbath, and that we should imitate 
his example, and rest in like manner. 

God forbid that ever any Christian should imitate 
the example of Christ in resting in his grave as 
Jesus did, under the bonds and horrible degra- 
dation of death, the curse of God against the sin- 
ner, and branded with infamy as a deceiver and 
blasphemer by men. How can any thoughtful 
man confound this last and deepest depth of our 
Lord's humiliation with the rest, benediction, and 
joy of God's blessed Sabbath life of rest from toil 
and curse? Not until the morning of his resur- 
rection did our Lord enter his rest; the rest of 
eternal life, which remaineth for the people of God, 
not in the wilderness, nor beneath the waters of 
Jordan, but in the promised land. 

The day of his resurrection was Christ's first 
true Sabbath rest. That his Church might not 
lack the blessings of repeated meetings with their 
risen Lord upon the Lord's day, and thus share 
with him in the Sabbath rest of his resurrection, he 
appeared to them repeatedly upon that day, and 
spake to them words of comfort. Especially in the 
evening, while they were assembled, he stood in 
the midst, and blessed them, saying, ''Peace be 
unto you." It is evident that he made an appoint- 



The Lord's Day. 8$ 

ment to meet them again that day week, else they 
had not remained away from their Galilean homes, 
at expense and risk, a whole week in Jerusalem. 
Nor would Thomas, who was absent from the first 
meeting, have been present unless he had expected 
to meet the Lord. A second time Jesus met them 
on the first day of the week, and permitted Thomas 
to satisfy his doubts. Thus our Lord sanctified the 
first two Lord's Days with his blessing. 

Seven weeks after the Lord had met with his 
disciples, and breathed on them, and said, *' Re- 
ceive ye the Holy Ghost," they were again assem- 
bled in Jerusalem. ''When the day of Pentecost 
was fully come, (being again the first day of the 
week,) they were all, with one accord, in one place," 
and therefore must have met by previous appoint- 
ment. This appointment must have been made by 
Jesus himself; for they were continuing in beheving 
prayer for the promised outpouring of the Holy 
Spirit at that time, and such prayer rests on a 
promise ; but there had been no date fixed in Jesus' 
previous promises. But while thus engaged in be- 
lieving prayer, the promise was fulfilled — the Holy 
Ghost was poured out on them, the Church was 
constituted, and blessed by this great baptism. 
God blessed this Christian Sabbath and sanctified it. 

Endowed with the gifts of the Holy Ghost, en- 
abling them to speak in languages they never 
learned, to heal sickness, and to conquer death, 
the prirnitiye Christians went forth preaching the 



S6 The Lord's Day, 



gospel, and establisliing churches, which met for 
worsliip on the first day of the week. Paul tarried 
a week at Troas to meet the disciples, who as- 
sembled on that day to break bread, in the Lord's 
Supper; and he preached to them, and prayed, and 
wrought a miracle on that day. Acts xx. 6-12. 
The churches in Greece were accustomed to meet 
for worship, and contribution for the poor, on the 
first day of the week. And our text exhibits the 
Lord's Day as w^ell known to all the churches. 
These various parts of Sabbath worship on the 
Lord's Day, namely, rest, prayer, preaching, con- 
tribution, communion, and benediction, are thus 
undeniably instituted by the example of the Lord 
and the apostles. 

By apostolic authority, also, the seventh-day Sab- 
bath was aboHshed. \\\ the primitive churches 
those who liad been brought up Hebrews con- 
tinued for a time to observe both the Jewisli and 
the Christian Sabbaths. Some of the more narrow- 
minded of these Hebrew Christians endeavored to 
impose both upon the converted Gentiles, with the 
rest of the law of Moses. But the Apostle Paul 
determinedly opposed their attempts, as frustrating 
the grace of God to all mankind. Particularly, he 
commands the Colossians, chapter ii. 16: **Let no 
man therefore judge you in meat, or in drink, or in 
respect of the new moons, or of the Sabbath days; 
which are a shadow of tilings to come; but the 
body is of Christ." This is an express repeal of tlie 



The Lord's Day. 87 

Jewish Sabbath. It leaves the Church in the secure 
and sole possession of the Lord's Day, as her well 
known and highly honored day of rest and worship. 

At the time our text was written the Lord's Day 
was a well-known and established Christian insti- 
tution. The Apocalypse, from w^hich my text is 
taken, was the last book of Holy Scripture. It was 
Avritten by John, the last survivor of the apostles, 
near the close of the first century. The third gen- 
eration of Christians, born, baptized, and taught 
by the apostle, since Christ's resurrection, were the 
readers of the book. Among them the observance 
of the first day of the week as their Sabbath was 
universal and sacred. To distinguish it from the 
Jewish Sabbath, it received a distinct name. This 
name was bestowed by the Holy Ghost, and is 
here used under his direction. As the disciples of 
Jesus w^ere distinguished from the Jew^s at Antioch 
by the name given by inspiration. Christians, so 
here the Holy Spirit marks the Christian Sabbath 
by its proper name, the Lord's Day, as the day on 
wliich he inspired John to behold, in the visions of 
the Apocalypse, that unending joy and peace which 
the Sabbath prefigures. 

God blessed the Sabbath by bestowing his bless- 
ing on man on that day. It is worthy of notice, 
that as the first benediction bestowed upon man 
was given upon the Sabbath, so the last bene- 
diction, and revelation, and vision of God in the 
Bible, were given on the Lord's Day. The last 



88 The Lord's Day. 



visit of our Lord to our earth, and those last visions 
of blessing to the Church and the redeemed world, 
which conclude the blessed communion of man 
with God in his incarnation, were given on the day 
which he has blessed. As the first grand dispen- 
sation of the Spirit on the day of Pentecost, so his 
last inspiration of the last venerable apostle by our 
Lord, the conclusion of Holy Scripture, was on the 
day he calls his own, the Lord's Day. The Reve- 
lation is especially the Sabbath book : it opens with 
a blessing; it is full of visions of Christ; it con- 
cludes with a blessing, and the promise of his 
coming, and of paradise restored. 

The grammatical form of the phrase is quite 
peculiar. It is not the day of the Lord, the geni- 
tive of the noun, but a feminine adjective, formed 
from the word Lord, and applied to qualify the 
word day: kuriake hemera. It is a form only used, 
besides, of the Lord's Supper; and that use en- 
ables us to understand its meaning. The Lord's 
Supper was instituted by the authority of the Lord, 
as Paul says : ' * For I have received of the Lord 
that also which I have delivered unto you." So 
we learn that the apostles did not invent the Lord's 
Day out of their own wisdom, but delivered it to 
the churches under the seal of Christ's own appoint- 
ment. Then the Lord's Supper commemorates the 
Lord's death; and the Lord's Day commemorates 
the Lord's resurrection. Moreover, we observe 
the Lord's Supper as an act of worship to Christ 



The Lord's Day. 89 

as our Lord ; and we observe the Lord's Day in 
recognition of his authority, and by adoration of 
his divinity, as the governor of the world. Finally, 
we observe the Lord's Supper, showing forth his 
death till he come; and we observe the Lord's Day 
in confident assurance of the coming of that glorious 
day when he will return to his deserted home, and 
our sin-stricken world, after its long weary week of 
sin, and toil, and sorrow, shall enter into the rest 
that remaineth for the people of God. Great day! 
for which all days were made ! Then the Lord's 
work of redemption being fully finished, all his 
people shall share his resurrection, and rise from 
their graves to reign with him in life eternal. Then 
indeed we shall all be in the Spirit on the Lord's 
Day. 



go How to Enjoy Sabbath Soul-rest, 



CHAPTER VIII. 

HOW TO ENJOY SABBATH SOUL- REST. 

Such being the design and nature of the Lord's 
Day, we need not be at a loss to discover the 
proper mode of its Christian observance. No be- 
hever in Christ can for a moment suppose that it 
stands on a lower level of religion than the Sab- 
bath of the Hebrews. It is as superior to that as 
Christ is superior to Moses. All the rest of body 
and soul, and all the blessings of Sabbath worship 
enjoyed by the Jews, are ours; and far more. We 
Christians are, by the death and resurrection of 
Christ, brought back to the condition of Adam in 
his days of innocency, when God smiled on him, 
and blessed him, and conversed with him as his 
Father and his friend. Such communion with God 
is our privilege, especially on the Lord's Day. 

The Sabbath spirit is, accordingly, the first requi- 
site for the right enjoyment of the Lord's Day. 
We should begin the day with a doxology, and 
give glory to God for life in Christ — bodily hfe in 
the use of our limbs and senses; soul hfe in the 
exercise of our reason, enabling us to know God 
our Father; eternal life, secured by our risen Lord, 
with whom our souls and bodies are for ever united 



How to Enjoy Sabbath Soul-rest. 91 

in the life eternal, already begun in us by his 
Spirit. We should, then, open our .souls to receive 
the Sabbath blessing in abundance, by prayer, and 
the reading of the Word. And we should not fail 
to make the day a blessed day to others, and allow 
the sunshine in our souls to illuminate our homes. 
The godly Covenanters of old, coming out from 
their closets of communion with the Blessed One, 
and endeavoring to make all around them partakers 
of their happiness, were wont to give the horses 
a double feed of oats on the Sabbath morning, to 
fodder the cows v/ith unthrashed sheaves, to throw 
handfuls of grain to the barn-door fowls, hurrying 
with outstretched necks to this Sunday-school les- 
son, and to line the church-going children's pockets 
well with mother's incomparable Sabbath ginger- 
bread and Sabbath cakes. Thus they expounded 
the promise, *'I will bless thee, and make thee 
a blessing." The Sabbath spirit is a festival spirit. 
The Lord's Day is a glad day, a day of rest, 
and joy, and thanksgiving. Heaven is seven miles 
nearer to earth that day than it w^as on Saturday. 
Yea, the kingdom of heaven is at hand, and we may 
step in, and for this whole day rest in Jesus. Where- 
fore, let us by all means be in the Sabbath spirit 
on the Lord's Day. And j^ou may carry the bless- 
ing to the poor, and the sick, and the aged, and 
rejoice with them in the Sabbath blessings of your 
visits. 

Next comes watchfulness. The Fourth Corn. 



92 How to Enjoy Sabbath Soul-rest. 

mandmentrbegins with '* Remember/' A Christian 
who begins the Sabbath thus ought to watch with 
prayer, that he may abide in the Sabbath spirit. 
As far as possible he should avoid vain and friv- 
olous conversation and reading. Many a Christian 
loses his precious Sabbath by reading a Sunday 
paper. It is utterly impossible for any mind first 
filled with the record of business, and politics, and 
vice, and crime, found in a Sunday paper, to enter 
into the rest and peace of the Sabbath, to be in 
the Spirit on the Lord's Day. One can not con- 
verse with Christ and Belial. Resolve, then, dear 
brethren, to banish the Sunday paper from your 
houses, and worldly and sinful joys from your souls 
on the Sabbath. 

The Lord's Day should be a day of rest. The 
toil-worn laborer should rest on Sabbath. The 
brain-weary worker should dismiss his cares and 
studies. The Christian worker, too, should rest. 
There is a religious Sabbath -breaking, as well as a 
worldly Sabbath-breaking. When one attempts to 
attend five or six religious services on a Sabbath, 
he attempts more than God made him able to do, 
and the result is, plainly, inefficiency, while working 
with fatigued body and mind ; and a sudden, and 
often a fatal, collapse into fever, paralysis, or in- 
sanity. For there is no law of God more irrevo- 
cable than the law of Sabbath rest. Incessant 
exertion of body and mind on the Sabbath are in- 
compatible with being in the Spirit on the Lord^s Day. 



How to Enjoy Sabbath Sotct-7rst, 93 

The Sabbath spirit will sufficiently regulate the 
Sabbath duties. Therefore you find no book of 
Leviticus in the New Testament. Only the Lord 
declares, ''I will have mercy before sacrifice." 
Then he feeds the hungry, heals the sick, teaches 
the Ignorant on the Sabbath, and declares that the 
Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath day, because 
it was made for man. As no man in the Sabbath 
spirit desires to sink his own strength in Sabbath 
drudgery, neither will he drudge his servants, or 
his cattle. Works of necessity and of mercy he 
will gladly do in the spirit of Christ upon the Lord's 
Day ; but no spiritually-minded man will keep his 
servants drudging over the cooking-stove, or toil- 
ing on the railroad, or in the warehouse, on the 
Lord's Day, while he and his family enjoy the 
luxury of Sabbath rest. 

The Lord's Day is especially 2. family day, when 
the children should be gathered around the table 
for the reading of God's word, and for conversation 
on it with their parents, for catechising, and for sing- 
ing the sweet songs of Zion. The public worship 
should be arranged so as not to interfere with the 
family religion. I fear that our modern usage of 
evening service, however useful for those who have 
no families, is a hindrance to that solid family re- 
ligion which our fathers cultivated. I would ad- 
vocate a return to the afternoon service, and the 
family reading and singing at home in the evening. 
*'If a man love me he will keep my words, and 



94 How to Enjoy Sabbath Soul-rest, 

my Father will love him, and we will come in to 
him, and make our abode with him.'' Let us wel- 
come Christ to our homes on the Lord's Day. 

The . Sabbath Psalm (xcii) lays great emphasis 
upon singing and playing on instruments of music, 
which the Holy Ghost commends as suitable means 
of acquiring and expressing the Sabbath spirit: ''It 
is a good thing to give thanks unto the Lord, and 
to sing praises unto thy name, O thou Most High: 
to shew forth thy lovingkindness in the morning, 
and thy faithfulness every night, upon an instru- 
ment of ten strings, and upon the psaltery; 
upon the harp with a solemn sound.'' He would 
have us use the piano at morning and evening 
family worship. Thus the Httle children are early 
and sweetly taught to sing the hosannas so delight- 
ful to Jesus that he praises their childish treble 
above the anthems of angels, saying, *'Out of the 
mouths of babes and sucklings thou hast perfected 
praise." 

CJiristian correspondence is a special Lord's Day 
duty. The Christian should imitate the example 
of our Lord in dictating, or writing, letters to dear 
friends at a distance; letters of love and counsel, 
and, if need be, of warning and reproof, and of 
exhortation to fight the good fight of faith, and 
win the crown of life ; such as he directed John 
to write to the seven churches on the Lord's Day. 
Our Lord abounded in methods of doing good, 
and all his methods were fruitful; but neither par- 



How to Eiijoy Sabbath SoiiU^est. 95 

ables, nor sermons, nor dialogues, nor miracles, 
exerted a more powerful or lasting influence than 
the letters of the Lord. Brief, discriminating, faith- 
ful, and loving, they remain, like seven stars* of 
heavenly luster in the night of the Christian's pil- 
grimage, lights on the path which leads to their 
native heaven, models of Sabbath correspondence. 

If every earnest Christian, especially those liin« 
dered by age, sickness, or distance from public 
services, would wTite seven short letters every Lord's 
Day to beloved friends in danger of becoming luke- 
warm, or who have only a name to live, or who are 
avowedly unbelievers, how many might be saved. 
Nay, if each wrote only one letter every Sabbath, 
he might bless fifty-two precious partners in the 
kingdom and patience of Christ every year — over 
a thousand in twenty years. Christian parents, 
especially, may thus enjoy the blessedness of send- 
ing the word of life to dear children from whom 
they are separated by oceans and miountains, and 
who, perhaps, lonely and w^eary amidst profane 
strangers, vv^ill bless you through eternity for the 
Lord's Dav letters which brouq-ht them back to 
Christ, and led them to read with renewed interest 
the Sabbath letters of the Lord. 

The weekly offering is one of the few duties com- 
manded to be done on the Lord's Day. Offering 
is the most ancient act of worship; so ancient that 
we have no record of its institution, only that the 
sons of the first man brought their offerings to the 



g6 How to Enjoy Sabbath SouU^est, 

Lord. All the generations of men since the days 
of Cain and Abel, have worshiped by sacrifice. 
Indeed, God expressly commands that *'none 
shall appear before me empty." He demands such 
a material and public acknowledgment that he is 
the Lord and owner of us and ours; and that we 
are only stewards of his property: ^'The silver is 
mine, and the gold is mine, saith the Lord of 
Hosts." Lie has appointed the poor as his col- 
lectors, saying, ''He that giveth to the poor 
lendeth to the Lord, and that which he hath given 
he will repay him again." Of the two tithes 
which, as the landlord of Palestine, he iiequired of 
the Hebrews, one was to be given to the poor, and 
the stranger, the fatherless, and the widow. It was 
so constantly the habit of our Lord to make alms- 
giving a part of his public worship at all the festi- 
vals, that when, during the celebration of the Lord's 
Supper, he spake privately to Judas, the other dis- 
ciples supposed he was directing him as the treas- 
urer of the little church to give something to the 
poor. And when he commissioned his apostle Paul 
to direct the Lord's Day worship of his churches in 
Europe, he commanded (i Cor. xvi. 1-3), ''Now 
concerning the collection for the saints, as I have 
given order to the churches of Galatia, so do ye. 
Upon the first day of the week, let every one 
of you lay by him in store, as God hath pros- 
pered him, that there be no gatherings when I 
come." Thus he consecrates the charity to his 



How to Riijoy Sabbath Soid-rest. 97 

poor brethren as a part of the worship offered 
to the Lord upon the first day of the week. By 
constituting the household treasury, he avoids the 
neglect of the duty when detained from church by 
family cares, or stormy Sabbaths. He makes every 
one of us, even the little child who can only bring 
his cent, and put it in his little tin bank on Sabbath 
morning, one of the partners in the great firm 
of Christ & Company, and smiles with tender ap- 
proval of the little fellow's delight that our blessed 
Lord has taken him, too, into partnership with him- 
self in his own blessed work of love. The rule 
as to the amount each one shall give is self-evi- 
dently just: **As God hath prospered him.'* The 
millionaire will no longer delude his conscience 
w^ith a ten-dollar bill in the plate on collection 
Sunday. The Hebrews paid a tenth of their crops, 
and of the increase of their flocks, as worship, 
and another tenth as land-rent. Surely Christians 
are not under lighter obligations than Jews. The 
poorest, even the pauper, can give a tenth of his 
income ; and, if the wealthy would prove God by 
bringing all the tithes into the store-house, there 
would be fewer failures. He w^ould open the win- 
dows of heaven, and pour out upon them a bless- 
ing which they should not have room enough to 
receive. When every boy and girl, every young 
man, and every young woman, every husband, and 
every wife, begins the Lord's Day by putting into 
his private treasury his weekly offering, there will 



98 How to Enjoy Sabbath Soul-rest, 

__ — I , » 

be no debts on the boards of missions, and no 
need of appeals from agents, and gatherings when 
Paul comes. 

There is no form of Sabbath profanation more 
common among professing Christians than their 
habitual refusal of obedience to the plain command 
of Christ by his apostle, to worship him by the 
weekly offering every Lord's Day. Thousands, who 
would be horrified at the thought of absenting 
themselves from the Lord's table, absent them- 
selves from our Lord's treasury. They suffer, in 
consequence, hardness of heart. God is angered 
with the dishonesty and untruthfulness of such 
covenant-breakers, and threatens to destroy the 
work of their hands. Ecclesiastes v. 1-8. And 
fires, and floods, and funerals, and bankruptcies, 
and apostasies, avenge the robbery of God. Grati- 
tude and love grow in the weekly offering. 

The Lord's Day should be a day of public wor- 
ship. So its very name declares. From the days 
of the apostles, all who loved the Lord have assem- 
bled on this day, even at the risk of their lives in 
the days of persecution, to sing his praise, and 
hear his word, commemorate his death and resur- 
rection. Forsaking the assemblies of the saints, in 
Paul's time, was regarded as drawing back to per- 
dition ; and it is still the first open step of apostasy. 
In the congregations of the saints for worship, be- 
lievers enter into the spirit of faith more fully, and 
experience the promise, '* Where two or three are 



How to Enjoy Sabbath Soul-rest, 99 

gathered in my name, there am I in the midst of 
them." Our Lord's first benediction, ''Peace be 
unto you," was bestowed on the Church assembled 
on the Lord's Day. And a day in Christ's courts 
is still better than a thousand, when the Sun and 
Shield gives grace and glory. 

The Lord's Day is the Church day. It was insti- 
tuted by the meetings of the Lord and his Church 
in their assembhes. While on earth he delighted 
to go to church, to sing the psalms in the midst of 
the congregation, to declare God's name to his 
brethren, and to perform miracles of mercy in 
church. The man who says, ''I can read my 
Bible as well at home," knows not the spirit of 
Christ, who could not be content with a selfish 
religion, but who, as he sang the pilgrims' songs 
of degrees, rejoiced in their saying to him, ''The 
house of the Lord ! Let us go ! Our feet shalj 
stand within thy gates, O Jerusalem! Jerusalem! 
The builded one! The city that unites together! 
Tribes have ascended that place, tribes of the 
Lord, to the testimony of Israel, to give thanks to 
the name of the Lord." The true Sabbath spirit 
is a longing to draw near to God. In the pubHc 
worship we help ourselves, and help our brethren, 
to a stronger faith, and a brighter hope, by our 
presence and our prayers, and so become more 
capable of receiving the fulfilment of the promises, 
"In all places where I record my name I will come 
unto you, and bless you. Where two or three are 



loo How to Enjoy Sabbath Soul-rest, 

gathered in my name, there am I in the midst.'* 
Oh, how often have we realized the presence of 
our blessed Lord" in his own house, and cried out, 
'*This is none other than the house of God, and 
the gate of heaven." When by sickness, or other 
cause, detained from the sanctuary, the believer 
cries, ^' How amiable are thy tabernacles, O Lord 
of Hosts! My soul longeth, yea, even fainteth for 
the courts of the Lord. My heart and my flesh 
crieth out for the living God. Yea, the sparrow 
hath found an house, and the swallow a nest for 
herself, where she may lay her young; even thine 
altars, O Lord of Hosts, my King, and my God! 
Blessed are they that dwell in thy house; they 
will be still praising thee." Heaven begins in the 
worshiping assemblies of the Church on earth; for 
what is heaven but the presence of Christ? 

The Lord's Supper is specially a Lord's Day or- 
dinance. Its relationship to the Lord's Day, as we 
have seen, is marked by its name. Paul tarried 
at Troas nearly a week that he might meet the 
brethren around the Lord's table on that day. The 
ancient churches observed the Lord's Supper every 
Lord's Day. And, when the modern churches are 
filled with a similar spirit of love, and of hungering 
and thirsting after righteousness, we also shall thus 
honor our Lord, and bless our souls. It is in- 
structive to note how uniformly a revival suggests 
a communion. A blessed communion Sabbath is 
the nearest approach on earth to the rest which 



How to Enjoy Sabbath Soul-rest, loi 



remaineth for the people of God, where we shall 
drink new wine with Christ in his Father's kingdom. 
Anticipation of the rest which i^emaineth for the 
people of God is a most blessed Lord's Day priv- 
ilege. Our Sabbath rest here is exceedingly im- 
perfect. The clang of the railway bell, the thun- 
dering trains, the rush of pleasure-seekers, the 
defiant traffic and revelry of so many of our cities 
without, and the inrushing processions of vanities 
within, our souls, often trample down the Sabbath 
rest into the ground, and suggest despair of ever 
seeing it properly enjoyed. But the Lord's Day 
is, nevertheless, a grand historic fact. It has reared 
its head amidst storms of persecution, and from 
denoting the day of the secret assemblage of a few 
Christian societies before day-break, with closed 
doors, it has become an institution of Christendom, 
the most public and popular of all the ordinances 
of Christianity. What a difference between the 
Lord's Day of the persecuted Apostle John and 
the Lord's Day of the nineteenth century. This 
grand advance of Sabbath rest in the past is a 
pledge and specimen of still greater glory in the 
future. If, even amidst the brutal convicts of a 
penal colony, John could become so inspired with 
the Sabbath spirit that the guilt and misery around 
him were all forgotten, and the glories of the New 
Jerusalem overshone the hills of Patmos, the be- 
liever, reading the account of these Lord's Day 
visions, may, in a smaller degree, but yet in a real 



102 How to Enjoy Sabbath Soul-rest, 

and blessed measure, enter into the same spirit, 
and by faith anticipate the coming Sabbath of the 
earth. 

As we retire to rest on the Lord's Day evening, 
let us then look forward to that blessed day of our 
Lord's return to introduce us to his everlasting 
rest. For the day of our resurrection, doubtless, 
will be the Lord's Day, the day of his entering 
into his rest. We know not the year, nor the 
hour, only we know that it is flying with all the 
wings of time toward us. Soon will the archangel's 
voice and the trump of God announce the begin- 
ning of the great day of rest to the weary world. 
The curse of labor, and toil, and poverty, and 
hunger, shall then cease, and the second Adam 
shall restore mankind to Paradise again, and to the 
sunrise Sabbath rest and glory on which man 
opened his eyes, after his first sleep in Eden. 

*'And he showed me a pure river of the water 
of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne 
of God, and of the Lamb. In the midst of the 
street of it, and on either side of the river, was 
there the tree of Hfe, which bare twelve manner 
of fruits, and yielded her fruit every month : and 
the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the 
nations. And there shall be no more curse : but 
the throne of God and of the Lamb shall be in it, 
and his servants shall serve him : and they shall 
see his face, and his name shall be in their fore- 
heads. And there shall be no night there, and, 



How to Enjoy Sabbath Soul-rest. I03 

they need no candle, neither light of the sun ; for 
the Lord God giveth them light: and they shall 
reign for ever and ever. Behold I come quickly! 
Blessed is he that keepeth the sayings of the 
prophecy of this book. He which testifieth these 
things saith, Surely I come quickly/' 

Our souls reply, Amen! Even so! Come, Lord 
Jesus! 



Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: August 2005 

PreservationTechnologies 

A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PRESERVATION 

1 1 1 Thomson Park Drive 

Cranberry Township, PA 16066 



